Poe is perhaps most celebrated as the inventor of the detective story.
You don’t need a brass plaque on your front door to realise that these are stories of split personality, of guilty conscience, of the duality of being. In one of his most famous doppelganger stories, the protagonist William Wilson is pursued throughout his debauched life by another man who looks exactly the same, and is also called William Wilson. Even if they start out as beautiful young maidens, they tend to become sickly, they fade, they die, and are entombed. The women in his stories do not last long. Another man has a wife who dies giving birth to a girl – who becomes a replica of her mother, and dies the same way. When he remarries, his second wife goes the same way.
A man has a beautiful wife who falls ill and dies. A man is stranded on a doomed ship, which is struck by another bigger vessel and takes him into the Abyss. In his stories lots of things happen twice. “I was sick – sick unto death … why will you say I am mad … tomorrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul.” These are the voices of existential anxiety we have come to know via Dostoyevski, Nietzsche, and Kafka. Everything is in the grip of a narrator who is normally relating events at emotional fever pitch. Characters rarely engage in conversation. Very little is overtly dramatized in Poe stories. These are images of the Gothic that have kept the horror movie industry fuelled with content for almost the last hundred years. But what makes them so striking and memorable is that the idea is both articulated via the narrator’s anguished state of mind and encapsulated in a vivid image – going down in a sinking ship suffering torture in the Spanish Inquisition a premature burial and a heart which continues to beat even after a brutal murder. He often starts a story with a philosophic reflection, and the central purpose of the story is to illustrate the idea. Hoffmann, but his influence has been much more widespread, and interestingly, given this influence, he was the first well-known American author to earn his living through writing – though this did not prevent him dying in poverty and neglect (dressed in somebody else’s clothes).
In fact he was preceded in some of these by E.T.A. Edgar Allan Poe is celebrated as the originator of several types of short story – the tale of Gothic horror, the science fiction story, the detective story, the tall tale, the puzzle, and the literary hoax. Tales of Mystery and Imagination is the name often given to collections of Poe’s stories. Short stories of Gothic horror and the macabre
0 kommentar(er)
