In Poe's Wake: Travels in the Graphic and the Atmospheric

In Poe’s Wake

In Poe’s Wake

Travels in the Graphic and the Atmospheric

Jonathan Elmer

The University of Chicago Press     Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2024 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2024

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83347-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83349-1 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83348-4 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226833484.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Elmer, Jonathan, 1961– author.

Title: In Poe’s wake : travels in the graphic and the atmospheric / Jonathan Elmer.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023039682 | ISBN 9780226833477 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226833491 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226833484 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809–1849—Appreciation. | Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809–1849—Illustrations. | Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809–1849—Film adaptations—History and criticism. | Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809–1849—Songs and music—History and criticism.

Classification: LCC PS2638 .E56 2024 | DDC 818/.309—dc23/eng/20230921

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023039682

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction

The Face, the Brand

Graphic and Atmospheric

Method and Mosaic

Part I: Graphic

1. The Black Box and the Eye

Graphicality

Graphic/Literature

The Black Box

The Eye

Disclosure

Facing the Unreadable

2. Unwatchable

The Frenzy of the Visible and the Grave of the Eye

The Black Box, Illuminated

Juvenile Culture

From Body Genres to Torture Porn

Part II: Atmospheric

3. The House and Its Atmospheres

Eaten Up by Ambience

Flow and Flou

La Lumière Cendrée

Atmosphere, Art, Eversion

Atmosphere and the Deformation of the Same

Aura and Aria

4. Estrangements of Voice

The Pythian Cosmos

Earworm

The Work of Art in the Age of Its Supernatural Reproducibility

The Presence of Absence

Incursion, Immersion, Explosion

Ambient Diptych

Afterword

Gallery

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

The Face, the Brand

There is no escaping the face. It’s everywhere: on the Poe me some more coffee mug, on the writer’s block paperweight, on the bobbleheads, and on the T-shirts with a raven perched on the shoulder. It’s on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, right at the top, separated off from the pile of other faces, as if for easier recognition.

Given that most of the faces on that famous album cover are celebrities who are easily identified, we might think Poe’s presence is part of a message about celebrity. But we get a better clue about Poe’s inclusion here from I Am the Walrus: Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe. The kicking of Edgar Allan Poe began early, arguably at birth; in terms of posthumous fame, it began with Rufus Wilmot Griswold’s biographical Memoir of the Author, included in his edition of The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe, published a year after Poe’s death.

In Griswold’s Memoir, we are told of Poe’s erratic behavior, his dissolute habits, his disagreeable egotism. We are told he had virtually no friends, that he was an outcast in his own society. Charles Baudelaire used Griswold’s edition for his many translations of Poe, but where the editor was opprobrious, Baudelaire was admiring. [Poe] was at all times a dreamer, griped Griswold, dwelling in ideal realms—in heaven or hell—peopled with the creatures and the accidents of his brain. He walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes upturned in passionate prayer. This melancholy flaneur hurling indistinct curses into the void is quickly assimilated into the Baudelairean playbook for the poète maudit. Poe is a model to be emulated for Baudelaire.

It’s not news that Baudelaire savored madness or melancholy and wore his damnation in the eyes of the world as a badge of honor. And like Baudelaire, we like our Poe well-kicked. The face we see reproduced everywhere testifies to this. Taken just days after an attempted suicide, the daguerreotype of 1848 is called the Ultima Thule daguerreotype (see figure 0.1).

Figure 0.1. The face. The Ultima Thule daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe, 1848. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

If Poe is so consistently associated with doom and gloom, it is probably due to this image as much as anything he wrote. The face stands for life-catastrophe—Poe’s own, certainly, but by extension all creative souls destroyed by the indifference of society. This is why Laura Howell, in her witty graphic summary of Poe’s life, can assimilate the Ultima Thule portrait to Munch’s The Scream: existential angst of a distinctly modern kind lies coiled in Poe’s dark eyes (see figure 0.2).

Figure 0.2. The face and The Scream. The Facts in the Case of Edgar Allan Poe. Illustration by Laura Howell for Nevermore: A Graphic Adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Stories (London: SelfMadeHero, 2007). Courtesy of Laura Howell and SelfMadeHero.

Poe’s face, sometimes accompanied by a raven, is what advertisers and graphic designers call a mark. It is meant to identify a Poe brand instantaneously. No treatment of the extraordinary range of Poe-inspired artworks that follow in his wake can evade this brand: this is what it means to say there is no escaping the face. Poe’s works and his person fuse in the brand. In a way unlike any other author, Poe appears as a character in adaptations of his own works, such as when Poe is conflated with the speaker in The Raven. He also appears as a character in works that are not written by him but that are self-consciously part of the Poe brand. In Netflix’s recent film, The Pale Blue Eye (2023), for example, Poe (Harry Melling) appears as a West Point cadet who helps the detective (Christian Bale) solve a grisly series of murders. Three elements of the brand are here combined: a tidbit from Poe’s life (he was in fact a cadet at West Point for a year), the activation of a genre associated with Poe (the detective tale; that is, ratiocination trained on acts of extreme violence—think The Murders in the Rue Morgue), and some fragment of his literary corpus, here reduced to the title, The Pale Blue Eye—words borrowed from The Tell-Tale Heart that have no relevance to the action of the film.

The Poe brand allows for this kind of freewheeling mix-and-match attitude to Poe’s words, works, and biography. Edgar G. Ulmer can produce a film for Universal Studios, The Black Cat (1934), that has nothing more than a title in common with Poe’s story and yet it remains true to the brand, as I argue in chapter 2. In this book I consider films and illustrations and prints and paintings and artist’s books and songs and operas and free improvisations and comic books and conceptual art installations and music videos and animations and cartoons and video games. Some of these works have only glancing connections to the particulars of Poe’s life and texts, but many others reveal complex transformations of Poe’s themes and formal devices. As inescapable as the brand is, it can also be a problem, a scrim that both makes it clear there is something behind it and makes it hard to access that something. But we cannot understand Poe’s extraordinary influence on creators in nonliterary media if we stop at the face. We need to dig deeper.

If there’s no way of getting around the face, then perhaps we can go through it. In 2011, Universal Studios in Florida erected a haunted house entertainment. Thrill seekers had to wend their way past a line of recycling bins to reach the entrance to Nevermore: The Madness of Edgar Allan Poe. There they would find a facade resembling giant sheets of scrawled-over manuscript paper, out of which Poe’s face emerged: you entered via the face. Once in the haunted house, viewers were led through a series of rooms, all associated with either Poe’s tales or his biography. In the room dedicated to The Pit and the Pendulum, for example, the main character is seen on a table getting sliced in half by the pendulum as the Spanish Inquisitors attack the guests, holding severed body parts of victims. Moving on, guests enter Poe’s portrait gallery, and see Poe calling out to his late wife Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe, as she and multiple other women from Poe’s life attack guests throughout the room. Poe’s life, his mind, turn out to be the real horror show: The madness of Edgar Allan Poe’s greatest works has come to life. Step into the mind of the iconic writer, where every turn of the page takes you closer to the brink of insanity.

Haunted house entertainments go back a long way. If confronting guests in a confined space with realistic depictions of severed body parts is the criterion, then we could go back to Madame Tussaud’s wax-figure Chamber of Horrors in the early nineteenth century. In the United States, the haunted house assumed its modern form during the 1930s to keep teenagers from vandalizing things on Halloween. Disney installed its first Haunted Mansion at Disneyland in 1969, effectively inaugurating the haunted attraction industry.

Prior to all these developments, though, the haunted house was a literary device. One could thus argue that the modern haunted attraction is always a kind of homage to literature. The metaphor of the mind as a haunted house is one Poe embraced, most insistently in The Fall of the House of Usher, in which the ancestral home (with its vacant eye-like windows) forms an organic unity with its two lonely inhabitants. In other words, Poe has already imagined something quite like this attraction, right down to its embrace of overkill. The relation between this attraction and Poe’s imagination begins to seem quite close. Even the forced march through themed rooms, each more grisly than the last, could make one think of The Masque of the Red Death and its color-coded itinerary of horror.

But the relation between this theme-park experience and Poe’s legacy lies still deeper. Film historian Tom Gunning has dubbed the earliest years of film (up to around 1906) the cinema of attractions. These early films are a harnessing of visibility, Gunning argues, an act of showing and exhibition. In this sense, early cinema participated in what has been memorably called the frenzy of the visible that seized publics in the latter half of the nineteenth century. These (necessarily) short early films aimed less to tell a story than to produce an effect. They were much closer to amusement park rides (or attractions, according to the term still in active use today) than to theatrical experiences.

Gunning borrowed this idea from Sergei Eisenstein, whose essay Montage of Attractions (1923) offers the following programmatic statement: "An attraction (in relation to the theatre) is any aggressive aspect of the theatre; that is, any element of the theatre that subjects the spectator to a sensual or psychological impact, experimentally regulated and mathematically calculated to produce in him certain emotional shocks which, when placed in their proper sequence within the totality of the production, become the only means that enable the spectator to perceive the ideological side of what is being demonstrated—the ultimate ideological conclusion."

Attractions are aggressive, they aim to induce sensual, psychological, and emotional impact or shocks. At the same time, they are aggressively controlled: experimentally regulated and mathematically calculated, always with a view toward the totality of the production and its "conclusion."

If you take the word ideological out of Eisenstein’s statement, you have a near-perfect reprise of Poe’s aesthetics of effect. Poe articulated an aesthetic principle about his short works that was also immediately legible to many who came after him. That principle was the unity of effect: the composition of any work should start from the effect it wishes to produce and strive to make the development of plot, setting, character, and symbol subservient to a felt sense of the unity of the effect. As with Eisenstein, one finds in Poe’s aesthetic an emphasis on violent, sensual, emotional, and psychological effects aimed at a reader but handled with great control, with a coolness of method. One of Poe’s most outrageous (and hence memorable; certainly influential) statements is that the composition of The Raven proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem. As in Eisenstein, totality is the fundamental value—everything leads to a conclusion that is experienced as a fusion of sensational effect and the apprehension of form.

It’s not impossible Eisenstein derived his theory of attractions and effects from Poe directly. But it doesn’t much matter: by Eisenstein’s time, these ideas had seeped into the groundwater. Both Poe (in The Philosophy of Composition, from which I have just quoted) and Eisenstein invoke mathematics, but the more important idea is that their productions can be experimentally regulated. A story or a poem or a play is not an outpouring from the soul—it is an experiment. John Tresch made this point best, and most consistently, as it relates to Poe: Poe treated literary ‘genres’ as a form of mass production. Applying the habits of his engineering training to the writing of fiction, Poe surveyed the field, analyzed the construction of earlier products, and applied these formulas in a series of works of his own. . . . Poe optimized his formulas, magnifying them into ‘grotesques,’ or rarefying them into more concentrated forms.

This experimental ethos helps make sense of the repetitions and variations in Poe’s work. Put the corpse beneath the floorboards, behind a wall, in a crypt, in a ship’s bunk; have the tale explode with a cat’s cry, a beating heart, a tinkling bell, a glutinous voice. Play around with codes and ciphers—as a clue to buried treasure, as mysterious glyphs on cavern walls, as a blizzard of printing errors. Set the drama of detection in a blood-smeared apartment or an elegant royal chamber.

Poe’s poems and tales are simultaneously indelible and provisional: you never forget them, but you can always change them. Being experimental, Poe’s works always have endings, but they are not finished. They are extensible: later artists feel that work on them can be continued. This might take the form of actually continuing a story, as Jules Verne extends The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket in his novel Le sphinx des glaces, or of recasting it, as Mat Johnson does with his novel Pym. But it more often takes the form of tinkering with Poe’s tales, adding and subtracting plot elements or characters. This tinkering, finally, points to a third trait: Poe’s tales are modular. Because there are so many continuities across different works, later artists feel free to grab and go, to reassemble elements in new configurations: hence, the prevalence of the mash-up in the archive of Poe remediations. Finally, because Poe’s works exemplify a method as much as they send a message, they are often taken as a whole, as a corpus. Hence the attraction of the anthology (many artists redoing Poe, gathered in one work) and the series (one artist redoing Poe across several works).

Poe’s signature themes—intense grief, intense fear, revenge, perversity, the analysis of signs, and the workings of ratiocination—are very often staged as dramas of extreme sensation. The intensity of affective experience is increased by the separation of sense modalities: his characters might have preternaturally acute hearing, for example, or be completely blinded in a dark space, or whirled about in waters of hideous velocity. For those coming after Poe, who are trying to understand and create with recorded sound, moving image, the nine-panel-grid, or the point-and-click video game, to take just a few examples, Poe’s analytic of the senses offered puzzles and provocations that could be addressed in new ways, according to the affordances of these new media.

Much will be said about Poe’s formal flexibility in what follows, but the gist is this: Poe wrote tales and poems that have a strong emphasis on closure—and its breakdown. The narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart kills a man and secretes his dismembered corpse beneath the floorboards: closure. Then he pulls up the floorboards: disclosure. This emphasis on vivid formal reversals is so insistent that form often becomes a theme in Poe. The maelstrom or vortex, for example, is not just a plot device; it is a figure of form. The same is true of Poe’s dark rooms, what I will call the black box. This combination of form as device and form as theme also appeals in special ways to later artists, as they seek ways to harness the powers of new media and platforms. The recursiveness of form encouraged a self-consciousness about medium as well.

In short, Poe exemplifies a modern method of aesthetic production for those in his wake: this is why he is so attractive to them. It’s as if he left his experimental works and his box of tools lying around for others to pick up and play with. The bundle of Poe traits—his thematic emphasis on extreme sensation, his flexible sense of form, his experimental and modular method, and, yes, his iconic personal profile—all feed into what I have been calling the Poe brand. But it is the argument of this book that those many artists and creators traveling in Poe’s wake make visible, beneath the face and the brand, fundamental categories of aesthetic experience applicable across the range of media that has developed since Poe’s death. I call these categories of aesthetic experience the graphic and the atmospheric.

Graphic and Atmospheric

If you say to someone familiar with Poe that his works are often quite graphic and also powerfully atmospheric, that person might respond: That sounds plausible. Some are certainly quite violent. I remember the scene with a guy gouging out a cat’s eye. And the woman shoved headfirst up the chimney. Oh! and the dismembered corpse—‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ right? As for atmospheric—do you mean moody? Some stories—‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ comes to mind—are kind of creepy or uncanny. Lots of shadows and vagueness—and a pervasive feeling that sadness or madness, or both, are at work. OK, I see your point.

I indulge in this imaginary conversation to suggest that both the graphic and the atmospheric are vernacular aesthetic categories—they are broadly available as terms we can apply to artworks and aesthetic commodities we encounter today. We might criticize the graphic violence that is the stock in trade of, say, the Saw franchise. We might revel in the inky shadows and anxious air of menace of our favorite noir films by calling them atmospheric. The terms are not meant to be all that precise: they are not technical analytic terms, like sfumato or free indirect discourse. But they are not meaningless just because they are imprecise or ambiguous. People find the terms useful. Because so many of the works I look at in this book are frankly mass cultural or popular, the vernacular dimension of aesthetic understanding is never far from the conversation.

As I made my way through (a portion of) the vast archive of remediations of Poe’s work in writing this book, I found myself gravitating toward these two vernacular aesthetic categories as both descriptive and sufficiently capacious to accommodate the many kinds of aesthetic objects I wished to discuss. It came to seem fundamental to me that Poe’s uptake had been massively visual—the face is part of this, but so is the enormous body of work by graphic artists of all kinds, from Manet to comic books. Equally important was the fact that Poe’s works are highly influential on the depiction of extreme—of graphic—violence. He is both kitschy and edgy, finding a niche in the world of tchotchkes as well as torture porn. His legacy is both mass cultural and avant-garde. I will argue that what is graphic in Poe applies across this range.

I organize this complex visual legacy by dividing it into two approaches. Both represent developments in visual media that Poe saw emerging in his time, and that deeply fascinated him. The practice of publishing illustrations to accompany literary works was rapidly accelerating during his career, though he was low enough on the publishing pecking order that it largely bypassed him. He did produce four Plate Articles, however—prose pieces written to accompany an already-made image. This saturation of mass-produced images in print environments engaged many graphic artists, especially in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and forced them to ask new questions about the relation between image and word. Poe’s aesthetics of darkness, something I explore in detail in chapter 1, proved especially provocative to many graphic artists, leading to innovation with the format of the book and explorations of the limits to vision and the visual.

The other approach to Poe’s graphicality (a word he coined) is via photography, a technology introduced only a decade before Poe’s death, about which he published some remarkably visionary words. For Poe, there seemed literally no limit to this new graphic art (for photography, as its name indicates, is graphic—the marks left not by the hand but by light): what it could show was literally beyond human comprehension, infinitely verisimilar. Poe’s aesthetic of darkness—all those closed rooms, pitch-black torture chambers, graves; what I call his black boxes—would need to be entirely revised under the conditions of photography’s infinite capacity to make the world visible. And it was revised—but in translating Poe’s darkness into light, cinema confronted a different limit: not what cannot be seen but what should not or must not be