SOURCE: “Writing and the Problem of Death” in Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing, Yale University Press, 1987, pp. 1-31.

[In the following essay, Kennedy examines the responses to death of various nineteenth-century American writers—including Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper—eventually focusing on the role of death in Poe's works.]

In the grip of death, Poe's Ligeia asks her husband to recite “certain verses composed by herself not many days before.” Nineteenth-century readers must have anticipated a scene of deathbed intimacy in which the dying woman would through a consolatory rhyme signify her readiness to die. Similar scenes filled contemporary fiction and poetry and—according to memoirs and biographies of the same period—mirrored a pervasive social practice. In Victorian England as well as America, “the deathbed presented the last preserve of truth; it was a final opportunity to repent, admonish or encourage.” The deathbed scene enabled writers of fiction to convey “the basic importance of the moral scheme” which underlay the popular literature of the day.¹ Dickens relied shamelessly on valedictions such as the passing of Little Johnny in Our Mutual Friend, and Charlotte Brontë drew upon the same convention to dispatch Helen Burns in Jane Eyre. For mid-century American readers, Uncle Tom's Cabin provided the quintessential deathbed scene, in which little Eva's “adoring Papa and a group of equally adoring slaves cluster in unspeakable grief around her bedside while she dispenses Christian wisdom and her own golden locks with profuse generosity.”² In the ritual of farewell, all that was sacred in bourgeois, middle-class culture—innocence, love, piety, and death—commingled in a moment of idealized beauty.

As if to parody the conventional beatific parting, however, Poe ascribed to the dying Ligeia a five-stanza poem entitled “The Conqueror Worm.” The lyric contains no uplifting vision, no affirmation of faith, no acceptance of death. Instead, it portrays the human condition as a “play of hopes and fears,” a “motley drama” staged for “an angel throng, … drowned in tears,” powerless to intervene in a pantomime of futility and annihilation.³ Whereas sentimental literature emphasized the sacredness of death and insisted on the beauties of the deathbed, Ligeia sees only the physical horror personified by the intrusion of the writhing “blood-red thing,” the Conqueror Worm. The narrator's recitation simply intensifies the dread Ligeia already feels; far from resigning herself to God's will, the woman springs to her feet and demands: “Shall these things be undeviatingly so?—shall this Conqueror be not once conquered?” Her challenge is both to the wisdom of Providence and to the religion of sentiment; her shocking verses overturn the prevailing image of death's loveliness and expose the hideous truth of decomposition. With Ligeia's defiant response, Poe deconstructs the idealized deathbed scene and calls into question the metaphysical assumptions upon which it was based.

Significantly, Ligeia reacts to the imminence of death through a gesture of language; she calls for a poem which allegorizes the very struggle in which she finds herself. If it does not deliver her from her creaturely predicament, the poem nevertheless voices primal anxiety and articulates the paradox that although man is created “in the form of God on high,” he suffers the ignominious and revolting fate of becoming food for worms. “Are we not part and parcel in Thee?” the dying Ligeia asks her Creator, returning to the complaint of her poem. That she has recorded in writing her thoughts on dying enables the narrator to repeat her words at the hour of death. Initially, both the request and the performance seem perverse, for the poem violates the decorum of her passing: it throws into doubt the meaning of death and the survival of the soul. Indeed, the poem rigorously excludes the spirit and reduces man to “human gore.” Why then has Ligeia called for the poem's recitation, and why has the narrator obeyed her? As a symbolic act, the deathbed reading inscribes a parable of the relation between language and mortality. In this crucial moment, the poem's verbal imaging of horror evokes a desperate resistance to death; its reiteration summons the woman's volcanic desire for life. Here, in the most elemental way, the word calls forth the will to be. And the narrator's presentation of the poem (in its ultimate enshrinement as a written text) marks another kind of resistance to death: language effects a symbolic transcendence of mortality. Although the poet must die, the poet's words survive as writing.

In considering the deathbed scene from “Ligeia” as a commentary on the complicity between writing and death, we arrive at a theoretical problem that pervades Poe's work and extends as well into the whole tradition of writing in Western culture. For the use of a mediating notation to signify an absent reality belongs—like death—to the legacy of man's mythic fall. In a sense the anthropological transition from oral to written culture reenacts the primal loss of an immediate and whole relationship to the created world; inscription is the sign of a transformation of consciousness.⁴ The writing of Poe presents us, however, with more than a useful instance of the phenomenon we seek to probe; in ways to be developed hereafter, the modern crisis of death expresses itself most intelligibly in Poe and leaves its trace in a radical redefinition of the status of writing.

Poe's attraction to the problem of death is so conspicuous that the reticence of modern criticism on the subject seems inexplicable. Here we find a writer whose entire oeuvre is marked by a compulsive interest in the dimensionality of death: its physical signs, the phenomenology of dying, the deathbed scene, the appearance of the corpse, the effects of decomposition, the details of burial, the danger of premature interment, the reanimation of the dead, the lure of tombs and cemeteries, the nature of mourning and loss, the experience of dread, the compulsion to inflict death upon another, and the perverse desire to seek one's own death. Typically these elements have been thought to express an unsound and morbid sensibility, a neurosis rooted in traumatic early experience, a conscious exploitation of Gothic conventions to produce the effect of terror, or an esoteric symbolism for the representation of philosophical or aesthetic concepts. This summary perhaps leaves out of account other passing theories, but the general tendency—toward a critical translation of mortality—displays itself in the landmark work of Edward Davidson. While noting that Poe, “perhaps better than any other writer of his time, defined the [contemporary] idea of death,” Davidson equates mortality with concealed eroticism and concludes that “death became … a series of seductive postures.”⁵ This inclination to construe death in Poe as sheer convention or as a code for other problems is itself symptomatic of a contemporary blind spot—our twentieth-century tendency (identified by Robert Jay Lifton, Ernest Becker, and others) to repress the reality of death much as the Victorians repressed references to sexuality.⁶ What criticism has largely overlooked is Poe's relentless effort to probe the nature of modern death anxiety.

For Poe the imaginary was dominated by the gigantic presence of death; but death held contradictory meanings, and its tangible image changed through the course of his engagement with writing. The following chapters pursue that phantasm to elucidate the writer's ambiguous response to a phenomenon variously experienced as a physical threat, a locus of anxiety, a tantalizing opacity, a disjunction of body and spirit, an absurd predicament, and—perhaps most important—an impetus for writing. But in directing this intense gaze upon Poe's texts, we shall concern ourselves somewhat less with their originality than with their semiotic features—that is, their tendency to encode recognizable psychic patterns, popular beliefs, contemporary myths, and philosophical questions, often in response to the conventions of magazine writing. For in mapping the relationship between writing and death in Poe, we perceive that inscription and mortality possess their own distinct histories within Western experience. Insofar as these histories can be rendered intelligible, we bring to the study of Poe's texts new perspectives on the symbolic interplay between language and silence. In effect, this book explores the theory that the very strangeness of Poe's poetry and fiction is less the symptom of an occult imagination than the sign of a cultural uncertainty which manifested itself—among other ways—in destabilized conceptions of both writing and death.

Before we can disentangle this relationship, however, we must briefly examine the social history of death to clarify the dilemma which encompassed Poe's career and shaped the perception and meaning of the end of life. We approach this problem somewhat blindly, for the modern aversion to death distorts our perception of nineteenth-century customs, which treated death as an elaborate celebration and melancholy as a fashionable affect. Death was not simply more acceptable to the nineteenth century; it was a subject of quiet fascination, even (one must conclude) a source of contemplative pleasure. Mourning art—in the form of samplers, vases, and jewelry—proliferated in the early nineteenth century, generating an iconography of loss that became conventionalized and ubiquitous. The experience of dying was a public event; one's passage from this life involved extravagant preparation, both in the recording of one's parting sentiments and in the solemn deathbed gathering of family and friends. The funeral assumed major significance—indeed, it became an industry during this period—and the mounting cost of funerals even led to the creation in England of burial clubs (much like the Christmas clubs of modern banks). Spacious new cemeteries sprang up in London, Paris, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, accommodating elaborate monuments and providing picturesque sites for increasingly pompous burials.

This was, in the apt phrase of Philippe Ariès, the “age of the Beautiful Death,” a period characterized (on the surface, at least) by a romantic conception of the earthly parting, in which the prospect of an otherworldly rendezvous loomed large. In the wake of eighteenth-century rationalism, orthodox religious sentiment enjoyed a superficial resurgence in consolation literature, as the hour of death became a fetishized event. Popular literature sponsored an ethereal image of mortality, purged of gross physical detail. Ariès summarizes the pervasive attitude:

Since death is not the end of the loved one, however bitter the grief of the survivor, death is neither ugly nor fearful. On the contrary, death is beautiful, as the dead body is beautiful. Presence at the deathbed in the nineteenth century is more than a customary participation in a social ritual; it is an opportunity to witness a spectacle that is both comforting and exalting. … But this apotheosis should not blind us to the contradiction it contains, for this death is no longer death, it is an illusion of art. Death has started to hide. In spite of the apparent publicity that surrounds it in mourning, at the cemetery, in life as well as in art and literature, death is concealing itself under the mask of beauty.⁷

Lawrence Stone has also observed an undercurrent of anxiety in the sentimental response to mortality: “The fashionable preoccupation with melancholy presupposed a certain scepticism about the prospects of another and a happier world after death.”⁸ This contradiction carries important implications for the way we read contemporary mourning art, consolation literature, and the lugubrious tales and verses of the ladies' magazines. The illusion of lovely death and its attendant melancholy disguised troubling doubts about ultimate concerns.

How the nineteenth century arrived at this ornately artificial practice deserves closer attention. As Ariès and Stone have shown in their separate investigations, the notion of a beautiful departure itself marked a break with earlier ways of thinking about mortality. So far as one can determine from early records, wills, funerary sculpture, literature, visual art, and treatises in the artes moriendi tradition, the reassuring model of “familiar and tame” death prevailed throughout Europe from the Middle Ages until the end of the Renaissance. Understandably, high mortality rates made death seem a commonplace, expected phenomenon; Stone points out that during the Renaissance, “death was at the centre of life, as the cemetery was at the centre of the village.” Even as late as the eighteenth century, most children died before reaching adulthood: “About half of the recorded children of French peasantry were dead by the age of ten, and between a half and two-thirds by the age of twenty. In the cities, conditions were worse still, and in London in 1764, forty-nine per cent of all recorded children were dead by the age of two, and sixty per cent by the age of five.”⁹

Such high rates of mortality created the sense of death as a constant, natural presence. Stone observes that “all affective relationships were thus at the mercy of sudden and unexpected death.” For adults, the hour of death involved a simple adieu without ornament or sentimentality, yet it was attended by public ritual which enabled both the dying person and his survivors to bear the parting. Serious attention was given to the idea of the good death and to the art of dying well, reconciled to the will of God. Loss of children, however, carried less importance, for the likelihood of early death obliged parents to “limit the degree of their psychological involvement with their infant children.”¹⁰ Nearly all burials were carried out under the aegis of the Church, which provided both a theological understanding of death and the consoling hope of a spiritual afterlife. Ariès contends that prior to the Enlightenment, “human beings as we are able to perceive them in the pages of history [had] never really known the fear of death.” If they felt sorrow about the inevitability of death, “their anxiety never crossed the threshold into the unspeakable, the inexpressible. It was translated into soothing words and channeled into familiar rites.”¹¹ The traditional intimacy between man and death diminished the psychological anguish of dying; the familiar sight of dead bodies neutralized the corpse as a physical image. These conditions enabled people to live—so far as one can determine—without anxiety about their bodily fate. They sometimes feared the spiritual judgment associated with death, but dying itself seems not to have aroused anticipatory dread.

By the end of the eighteenth century, however, conditions had begun to change dramatically. Declining child mortality rates and increasing life expectancies meant that death assumed a different aspect: no longer a familiar presence, an expected visitor, it gradually became a feared intruder. Revised expectations about the survival of children (as well as spouses and friends) prompted the growth of more affectionate relationships, which in turn altered the meaning of the loss of a loved one: “The death of an infant or young child was no longer shrugged off as a common event on which it would be foolish to waste much emotion.”¹² John McManners reports that “between 1700 and 1800 fully ten years were added to the average life span of Frenchmen,” creating the general impression that “death was being defeated.”¹³ At the same time, the rise of rationalized religion, in which God came to be viewed as the benign but distant maker of a harmoniously ordered world, helped to erode belief in a sacred, divinely intended death and in an edifying distinction between heaven and hell. The more “enlightened” view of death rejected the notion of eternal judgment as incompatible with divine benevolence. While the traditional concept of heaven retained some attraction, death became an increasingly secular occurrence; as Stone suggests, “the dying, as well as the survivors, were affected by the decline of confidence in the consolations of religion.”¹⁴

Meanwhile the place of burial shifted from local churchyards to more remote public cemeteries, created to alleviate insanitary conditions in the city. As a public project, the relocation of cemeteries seems to imply a general indifference toward the dead and their burial, as if changing religious views had effected a communal devaluation of death. Yet this civic indifference stands in contrast to the private, individual experience of loss. Stone asserts: “There was an intensification of grief in the eighteenth century, and it was expressed not only more openly, and more bitterly, but also less ritually, in a more personal, more introspective manner.”¹⁵ For the bereaved, the cemetery became a focus of grief, the place of frequent visits: “Now people wanted to go to the very spot where the body had been placed, and they wanted this place to belong totally to the deceased and to his family.”¹⁶ Until this period, Ariès adds, “the pious or melancholy visit to the tomb of a dear one was an unknown act.” But within a single generation, the visit to the cemetery became a significant practice; physical remains gave meaning to a plot of earth. Previously paupers and common people had been buried in open, mass graves; now even the poor desired an individual burial site and a memorial stone. This is precisely the sentiment of Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard,” a poem which captures the idea of pleasurable melancholy while revealing the anxiety of oblivion: even if the “paths of glory” led but to the grave, the common villager as well as the hero felt the desire for remembrance.

The remarkable popularity of graveyard poetry toward the middle of the century provides the best evidence of a tendency to regard the tomb as a focus of meditation. As religion began to lose its consolatory force, death acquired a disquieting power over the imagination. Curiously, many of the poets associated with the cult of melancholy were themselves clergymen; their verses manifest an implicit attempt to recover death (which had been in a demographic sense defeated or banished) as an aid to Christian reflection. But their preoccupation with things sepulchral had quite a different general effect: popular works like Young's Night Thoughts and Blair's The Grave excited curiosity about the physical sensations of death, introduced fantasies about dead spirits, and conferred upon the tomb and the cemetery an irresistible fascination. For centuries, death had simply marked a passing, a movement toward a more important fate; with longer life expectancies, closer affective relationships, secularized funeral practices, and declining belief in an afterlife, death assumed a terrible significance in itself and was no longer familiar or tame.

Clearly the patterns of change in the later eighteenth century—notably the fetish for graveyards and melancholy—created the enabling conditions for the elaborate pageant of death that unfolded during the next century. The idealizing of death did not begin, however, with one dramatic event; rather it emerged from the nascent Romantic tendencies of the preceding era. As Enlightenment rationalism gave way to a sensibility infused with nature-worship, sentimentality, superstition, and transcendental idealism, death itself began to acquire similar attributes. One obvious development was the growing association between death and nature; death was increasingly displaced from its traditional religious context and linked to natural processes and cycles. In “Thanatopsis,” William Cullen Bryant sought to efface “sad images / Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall” with a sweeping view of natural splendors adorning “the great tomb of man.” This commingling of nature and death reached its culmination in the rural cemetery movement, which endeavored to “convert the graveyard from a shunned place of horror into an enchanting place of succor and instruction.”¹⁷ For those generations raised on Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Chateaubriand, nature seemed the sign of an enfolding and consoling spiritual presence which softened the harshness of death. The inheritors of deism regarded the isolated tomb in a rural setting as the ideal site to worship God “as the author of the beauties of Nature, as [a being] supremely generous and good, and as the guarantor of the continuance of human loves and friendships beyond the grave.”¹⁸

Interest in sustaining relationships beyond the grave reveals another aspect of change. The intensification of affective relationships, which Stone ascribes to demographic trends, led to a new emphasis in the nineteenth century on death as a separation of loved ones: “The centre of attention now shifted from the behaviour of the dying to the response of the living.”¹⁹ Ariès describes this new perspective as “the death of the other,” indicating that the hour of death now found its primary meaning as social ritual—as a privileged occasion for edification and sentiment. Those who gathered to witness a death effectively enforced the decorum of dying. To manifest their involvement in the death of the other, mourners began to symbolize their sentimental attachment to the corpse through memorial jewelry which often included a lock of hair from the deceased. The proliferation of mourning art in America (said to date from the death of George Washington in 1799) testifies to a revealing vogue for commemoration.²⁰ Romantic emphasis on individualism, the uniqueness of the self, found its outcome in the practice of marking an individual's death with artifacts of remembrance. Commemoration became a sign of devotion, a measure of one's love for the departed Other; in this way memorializing gestures—such as wearing a mourning necklace or visiting a tomb—symbolically extended the relationship severed by death.

During the early nineteenth century social and religious practice conspired to make an edifying aesthetic spectacle out of the banal experience of death. John Reed notes that for the Victorians, the beauty of the deathbed scene required a studied avoidance of the actual physical death. He cites Dr. Dabbs's account of the death of Tennyson (“a figure of breathing marble, flooded and bathed in the light of the full moon streaming through the oriel window”), which reminds the physician not of gross physical reality but of the poet's own “Passing of Arthur.”²¹ This exemplary scene suggests that the nineteenth-century impression of death's beauty involved an act of communal self-delusion, a tacit refusal to see dying as a physical process. Yet the age also developed a paradoxical attachment to the dead body: death masks, portraits “in death,” and locks of hair woven into floral designs all reflect this preoccupation. So too does the characteristic nineteenth-century funeral, with its ritualized attention to a corpse attired in handsome clothing, surrounded by flowers, displayed in a polished coffin, and (with growing frequency) embalmed to eliminate the possibility of odor. The funeral procession, carried out with increasing pomp, often featured an ornate, glass-sided hearse which enabled mourners to gaze upon the coffin. James Stevens Curl's description of the Victorian funeral suggests the material extremes of this “celebration of death” as practiced in England.²² American burial customs, though less extravagant, disclose a similar attachment to the very body whose disfigurement had been largely ignored during the crisis of death.

This seemingly contradictory attitude embodies an essential dilemma in nineteenth-century culture. Death itself had become less familiar through increased life expectancy, and closer family relationships made its intrusion seem a cruel, inexplicable deprivation. In the face of these anxieties, a pious consolation literature sprang into being; as if to offset doubts about the Christian promise of eternal life, authors concocted detailed descriptions of the amenities of heaven. Ann Douglas has called attention to the necrolatry inherent in these works: “Such writings inflated the importance of dying and the dead by every possible means; they sponsored elaborate methods of burial and commemoration, communication with the next world, and microscopic viewings of a sentimentalized afterlife.”²³ But the continuing erosion of Christian belief, together with the development of scientific interest in the physiology of dying (to be discussed in chapter 2) further intensified the sense of a horrible discontinuity between bodily dissolution and spiritual transcendence. Indeed, the physical signs of approaching death now presented such a powerful challenge to faith that nominal believers agreed to ignore the former in order to protect the latter. Mounting uncertainty about the survival of the soul seems in fact to underlie the conflicted strategy of the Beautiful Death. Behind this paradoxical practice, we see that the aversion to the dying flesh and the fetishization of the dead body are symptoms of the same doubts about the meaning of mortality. One cannot escape the impression that the cult of death and memory flourished precisely because it undertook to insure at least a limited, symbolic perpetuation of the deceased, a material survival in the signs and artifacts of mourning.

A long view of Western attitudes toward death—even one as diffuse as Ariès'—reveals an increasing velocity of change from the eighteenth century through the twentieth. The reassuring model of the tame death, prevalent until the late seventeenth century, disappeared with the rise of an urban, industrialized, post-Christian culture.²⁴ In its place emerged a multiplicity of contending beliefs and assumptions, generating pervasive anxiety about the nature and meaning of death. The Christian message of resurrection continued to be preached, although clergymen as frequently extolled the beauty of dying, outlined the spiritual benefits of grief, or portrayed heaven as a glorious family reunion. But an essential surety had been lost, and in the burgeoning cities of England and America, where capitalism had already supplanted Christianity by seeming to embrace it, a secular materialism had taken root, alienating inhabitants from each other through a subtle breakdown of communal beliefs. Perhaps in response to the obscure sense of social fragmentation and metaphysical uncertainty, believers and nonbelievers turned to death and its rituals as the last stronghold of collective values. David Stannard reaches a similar conclusion about the “overriding national treatment of death” between the Revolution and the Civil War:

In large measure, if not entirely in response to the growing individual anonymity brought on by changes in their social world, Americans sought a return to their lost sense of community in the graveyard and the heavenly world of the dead; in the process, paradoxically, they effectively banished the reality of death from their lives by a spiritualistic and sentimentalized embracing of it.²⁵

That is, the celebration of death dramatized the desire to reestablish bonds of commitment and solidarity in a decentered society, but by masking death in beauty it obscured the primal basis of community.

Many of Poe's contemporaries nevertheless participated in the effort to invest mortality with sentimentalized beauty. Displaying as much commercial acumen as craftsmanship, Washington Irving included among the materials for The Sketch Book a richly representative piece entitled “Rural Funerals,” which expatiates on devotion to the dead: “The love which survives the tomb is one of the noblest attributes of the soul. … Aye, go to the grave of buried love, and meditate!” Irving also included two tales of pathos, “The Broken Heart” and “The Pride of the Village,” which illustrate the sentimental association of death with young women. In the latter tale, an expiring maiden forgives the young soldier who fatally jilted her:

He rushed into the house, and flew to clasp her to his bosom; but her wasted form—her death like countenance—so wan, yet so lovely in its desolation, smote him to the soul, and he threw himself in an agony at her feet. She was too faint to rise—she attempted to extend her trembling hand—her lips moved as if she spoke, but no word was articulated—she looked down upon him with a smile of unutterable tenderness, and closed her eyes forever.²⁶

Although Irving sometimes approached the realm of terror (as in “The Adventure of the German Student”), he rarely contemplated the physical manifestations of death; he was obsessed by mutability rather than decomposition, and the tone of nostalgic melancholy struck a chord of response in a period of idealized death.

Though hardly a sentimentalist, James Fenimore Cooper also found the convention of beautiful death inescapable when he brought Leatherstocking to the bar of judgment in The Prairie. The aged trapper, surrounded by his Indian friends and his young protégé, Middleton, takes his leave in a ceremony of farewell which (while technically lacking a bed) incorporates the features of the standard deathbed scene. The old man's virtuous existence has enabled him to die beautifully and without suffering: “Decay, when it did occur, was rapid, but free from pain.”²⁷ Leatherstocking declares his faith—“I die as I have lived, a Christian man”—and blesses those around him. He expresses uncertainty about meeting his Indian friends in heaven, alluding delicately to the notion of a racially segregated hereafter; but he allows that the Christian heaven and “the place of Good Spirits” may be the same: “If it should prove that the same meaning is hid under different words, we shall yet stand together.” He provides for the distribution of his earthly goods, requests that his faithful dog Hector be buried with him, and then speaks of the importance of commemoration by recalling his efforts to secure “a graven stone” for his father's resting place. The point of his story is not lost on Middleton, who promises to place a stone at the head of the trapper's grave. Even the simple woodsman betrays his desire for remembrance and specifies the inscription for his memorial stone: “ ‘Put no boastful words on the same, but just the name, the age, and the time of death, with something from the holy book; no more, no more. My name will then not be altogether lost on ’arth; I need no more.’ ”²⁸ Here Cooper juxtaposes the serenity of faith with the anxiety of oblivion; Leatherstocking must insure his own commemoration before he can go peacefully to his rest. The author underscores the symbolic importance of the gesture by referring in the final paragraph to the perpetuation of the trapper's memory. The grave “is often shown to the traveller and the trader as a spot where a just White man sleeps,” and faithful to his word, Middleton has provided the requested stone, adding only one line dictated by a need to sanctify the burial site: “ ‘May no wanton hand ever disturb his remains!’ ” The isolated grave becomes the focus of melancholy visitation and remembrance.

One has only to compare the death of Leatherstocking with the aforementioned death of little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin to observe the consistency and durability of the idealized deathbed scene. But this model held little interest for Nathaniel Hawthorne, who made use of it only in “The Gentle Boy” and one or two minor pieces. The contemporary closest to Poe in his response to death, Hawthorne concerned himself with “the power of blackness” mainly as the source of guilt and sin. If death possessed a horror for him, that horror lay in its revelation of human weakness and imperfection. A tale like “Roger Malvin's Burial” aptly illustrates this point (and provides an implicit contrast to Cooper's handling of death in the wilderness). Roger Malvin's fatal wound creates a dilemma for Reuben Bourne, who must choose between his own survival and a proper burial of his comrade. The dying man's double messages contribute to Reuben's anguish: Malvin simultaneously urges the younger man to go on without him and laments the terrible fate of dying alone in the forest. The cruel paradox is that the intrusion of death makes it impossible for either man to do the “right” thing. The thought of abandoning Malvin to a death without burial sickens Reuben (who is endowed with a nineteenth-century fastidiousness about attending to the dying); but finally the desire to save his own life, coupled with the charge to care for Malvin's daughter, persuades Reuben to depart. However, the younger man creeps back for one last look: he wants to see how Malvin will face death. In a heavily ironic passage, Reuben imagines the terrors of the dying man and unconsciously casts himself as a figure of death: “He felt how hard was the doom of the kind and generous being whom he had deserted in his extremity. Death would come, like the slow approach of a corpse, stealing gradually toward him through the forest, and showing its ghastly and motionless features from behind a nearer, and yet a nearer tree.”²⁹ Does the association of Reuben with approaching death imply an authorial judgment, does it mirror the younger man's guilty self-image, or does it simply reflect Reuben's own projected death anxiety? As is usually the case, Hawthorne gives us no way to cut the interpretive knot; the ambiguity of the forest scene exemplifies what Hawthorne (in The Scarlet Letter) called “the dark problem of this life,” the inescapable enigma of suffering and death entailed by earthly existence.

In defying the muse of sentiment, Hawthorne (like Poe) risked his survival as a professional man of letters. For the American publishing scene was indeed dominated by adherents to the cult of death and memory. Perhaps the poetry of Lydia Huntley Sigourney best exemplifies the treacly treatment of mortality in all its forms. Fully half of the verses in her Poems (1841) pursue doleful themes, as suggested by such titles as “The Dying Mother's Prayer,” “Death of a Clergyman,” “Death of the Wife of a Clergyman,” “Death of a Young Lady at the Retreat for the Insane,” and “Death of the Principal of a Retreat for the Insane.” Mrs. Sigourney was especially partial to the death of infants and small children, and in “Boy's Last Request” we observe a typical mixture of anguish and faith:

Half-raised upon his dying couch, his head
Drooped o’er his mother's bosom,—like a bud
Which, broken from its parent stalk, adheres
By some attenuate fibre. His thin hand
From ’neath the downy pillow drew a book,
And slowly pressed it to his bloodless lip.
                    “Mother, dear mother, see your birth-day gift,
Fresh and unsoiled. Yet have I kept your word,
And ere I slept each night, and every morn,
Did read its pages, with my humble prayer,
Until this sickness came.”
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          He paused—for breath
Came scantily, and with a toilsome strife.
                    “Brother or sister have I none, or else
I’d lay this Bible on their hearts, and say,
Come, read it on my grave, among the flowers:
So you who gave it must take it back again,
And love it for my sake.” “My son!—my son,”
Murmured the mourner, in that tender tone
Which woman, in her sternest agony
Commands, to soothe the pang of those she loves,
“The soul! the soul!—to whose charge yield you that?”
“Mother,—to God who gave it.”
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          So, that soul
With a slight shudder and a lingering smile
Left the pale clay for its Creator's arms.(30)

Here the unsoiled yet well-read Bible testifies to the spotless virtue of the boy (he with the head precariously attached) who dies with a smile, lamenting only the fact that he has no brother or sister to visit his grave. To be sure, the death of a child is an incalculable loss; but Mrs. Sigourney and her brothers and sisters in sentiment managed not only to exhaust the literary possibilities of the subject but to turn it into a facile cliché.

From the 1820s until well after the Civil War, the ladies' magazines and gift books promulgated an unending stream of lachrymose lyrics, ostensibly for the sake of consolation. Ann Douglas speculates that such writing actually enabled middle-class women and Protestant ministers to capitalize on death and to recover a sense of social purpose, since both had been dispossessed by the emergence of a post-Christian, entrepreneurial economy.³¹ Whatever its underlying intentions, this “domestication of death” (as Douglas calls it) turned grief into a commodity and dying into an increasingly unreal phenomenon. It also produced a flood of unbelievably bad writing and encouraged the likes of Emmeline Grangerford, the morose young poetess in chapter 17 of Twain's Huckleberry Finn: “She warn’t particular, she could write about anything you choose to give her to write about, just so it was sadful. Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on hand with her ‘tribute’ before he was cold.” With respect to popular literature in the early nineteenth century, there was less exaggeration in Twain's caricature than one might suppose.

Such was the cultural environment in which Poe endeavored to sustain himself as a writer. That he found the funereal sentimentality of the day at least a valid rhetorical mode may be surmised from his approbation of Mrs. Sigourney, Mrs. E. F. Ellet, and Miss H. F. Gould, all contributors to the Southern Literary Messenger during Poe's editorship. In 1842 he deprecated the “namby-pamby character” of Graham's Magazine in a moment of pique; however, there is no evidence that he found the literary preoccupation with death unhealthy, inappropriate, or laughable. By temperament and personal bereavement, Poe was drawn into the cult of death and memory. But if he respected the fashion for sentiment, he eschewed the conventional sad-but-joyful departure, and he clearly saw through the mask of beauty that concealed the features of human dissolution. In his “Marginalia” series Poe observed trenchantly: “Who ever really saw anything but horror in the smile of the dead? We so earnestly desire to fancy it ‘sweet’—that is the source of the mistake; if, indeed, there ever was a mistake in the question.”³² Unlike most of his contemporaries, he refused to soften or idealize mortality and kept its essential horror in view; but he also moved beyond the Gothic formula to explore divergent forms of death experience.

In speaking of Poe's relationship to the literature of melancholy, I have claimed that he was inclined by sensibility and personal loss to participate in the fetishizing of death. But in fact Poe's relationship to writing remains problematic, for we have as yet developed no means of gauging the fit between private contemplation and public expression. Unlike his contemporaries, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, and Melville, Poe left no journals or notebooks—no exclusive glimpses into the workings of his creative intelligence. We cannot follow (as with Hawthorne) the accretion of ideas and images seminal to a narrative; we cannot trace (as with Thoreau) the evolution of a major work from preliminary jottings in a diary through a notebook version to finished prose. Although we have been able to assemble some notions about Poe's habits of revision through comparisons of variant texts, no comprehensive view of Poe's method has yet emerged. While some of his letters refer to artistic aims and principles, these comments tend to be brief, infrequent, contrived, and patently self-serving. Similarly, his essays and reviews deliver public literary judgments but shed little light on the intimate relationship between Poe and his texts. In “The Philosophy of Composition,” for example, his remarks about the death of a beautiful woman sidestep personal meanings and turn immediately to the problem of formal effects. While articulating ideas about beauty, brevity, and unity of impression, he maintained a silence about his characteristic obsessions: murder, revenge, madness, premature burial, disease, revivification, perverseness, ratiocination, mesmerism, and the like. He left no private record which might help us to understand the odd conjunctions in his work—of humor and horror, mystery and irony, passion and parody, profundity and triviality. Nowhere did Poe volunteer an explicit, privileged insight into his nightmarish vision; nowhere did he explain his commitment to the life of writing.

But Poe left traces of such a theory in the writing itself. As we have seen in “Ligeia,” Poe incorporates within the tale a poetic text attributed to the dying woman; the poem allegorizes (and thus comments on) mortality within a scene which probes the relationship between language and death. Attentiveness to this self-referential element in Poe's writing enables us to construct from fragments, hints, analogies, and reflexive ironies an operative philosophy of composition that corresponds both to the broad range of his texts and to the different registers of his writing voice. Two examples of this implicit commentary, drawn from the early “Tales of the Folio Club,” establish more clearly the basis of a theory of writing in the problem of death.

The abortive “Folio Club” project was implicitly an exercise in criticism, a series of fictional glosses on the modes of writing popular in Poe's day. By assigning a tale to each comically named member of the Folio Club, the author apparently intended to satirize both literary circles and parochial tastes. Most of the eleven narratives are transparently farcical, but several employ a more subtle parody in which the element of satire seems subordinate (even antithetical) to the dramatic effect.³³ Collectively the tales represent an uneven effort to mimic the forms and styles of fiction available to Poe in the early 1830s; individually, many also refer to the activity of writing or to the way that language interposes between the writer and the silence of mortality.

In the “Folio Club” collection, Poe included a surreal word painting called “Siope. A Fable,” later retitled “Silence—A Fable.” As A. H. Quinn has remarked, the prose-poem was probably an emulation of Bulwer's magazine tale, “Monos and Daimonos. A Legend.”³⁴ But the haunting imagery of “Silence” seems to derive more clearly from two of Poe's early poems, “The Valley of Unrest” and “The City in the Sea,” both published in 1831. These lyrics depict strange scenes of desolation which corroborate Davidson's characterization of Poe as a “verbal landscapist of death.”³⁵ “The Valley of Unrest” portrays a remote and silent place—patently a fallen world—animated by preternatural movement; “nothing there is motionless,” and “reedy grass” waves “over the old forgotten grave,” while “gorgeous clouds” sail across the “terror-stricken sky” (CW, 1:192). In “The City in the Sea,” one encounters an emblematic domain in which “Death looks gigantically down” from “a proud tower in the town.” This is unmistakably Death's kingdom; he has “reared himself a throne” in this “strange city” of “gaping graves” and “sculptured” tombs encircled by “melancholy waters” said in a later version of the poem to be “hideously serene.” The only movement occurs when the city sinks into the sea, giving the waves an infernal “redder glow” (CW, 1:201-02).

These poems anticipate the allegorized terrain of death in “Silence—A Fable,” where Poe once again conjures up a weird realm agitated by “convulsive motion” (CW, 2:195). This movement is lifeless and dreamlike: the sickly waters “palpitate forever and forever”; immense lilies sigh, stretch their “ghastly necks” toward heaven, and “nod to and fro their everlasting heads”; huge “primeval” trees “rock eternally hither and thither”; “strange poisonous flowers” are seen “writhing in perturbed slumber”; gray clouds “rush westwardly forever.” Motion is ineffectual (for nothing changes) yet incessant (there is “neither quiet nor silence”). Amid this scene the narrator discovers a gray rock, its surface engraved with writing that cannot initially be deciphered. The red light of the moon, however, enables the speaker to read the word Desolation, an inscription that refers not to the landscape (already described as desolation) but to the relationship between word and world. Immediately Poe throws into question the relationship between signifier and signified: upon the rock appears a man “longing after solitude” and filled with disgust for mankind, and when the speaker pronounces “the curse of silence” (presumably to admonish the seeker of solitude), the preternatural motions stop, all sounds cease, and the inscription on the rock becomes Silence. Patently an image of death, this vision of stillness evokes horror, and the man flees aghast. Significantly the transformation of the land occurs through an articulation of the word which literally inscribes itself upon a rock. As speech passes into inscription, the sign creates the reality that it supposedly represents. In this cryptic fable, language discloses its conspiracy with death, for its power to affect the solitary man lies in its evocation of an absolute solitude and silence. A paradox manifests itself: within the narrative, language calls forth silence; this action mirrors (and reverses) the writing of the narrative, in which the idea of silence has called forth language.

Apparently Poe changed the title of this sketch from “Siope” to “Silence” in 1840 to underscore the significance of this final transformation. But he also thereby acknowledged a relationship between the prose piece and his recently published “Sonnet—Silence,” a poem which distinguishes between two kinds of silence in a way that clarifies the terror of the prose sketch. The sonnet speaks first of the silence of the body, the “corporate Silence” that “dwells in lonely places, / Newly with grass o’ergrown.” This entity has been domesticated by the cult of death and memory: “some solemn graces, / Some human memories and tearful lore, / Render him terrorless: his name's ‘No more’ ” (CW, 1:322). Physical death inspires no dread, because “no power hath he of evil in himself.” Real terror resides in the nameless shadow, the silence of the soul. Here Poe exposes the anxiety underlying the Beautiful Death: if the spirit survives in an afterlife, man can endure the corporate silence, but if the soul itself also dies, there exists no hope and death is indeed evil. The shadow which personifies this latter fate is said to haunt “the lone regions where hath trod / No foot of man.” Ostensibly these are the very regions depicted in the prose sketch “Silence—A Fable,” for the prospect of such a silence inspires dread in the solitary observer: “his countenance was wan with terror.” He has seen not simply an image of corporal death but a sign of the spirit's extinction. The latter is the source of real alarm, for as Poe observed in his preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, “terror is not of Germany, but of the soul.”

In casting the revelation of “Silence—A Fable” as writing which speaks in silence, Poe figured a complicity between the two. His fable permits us to contemplate the horizon of language as it circumscribes mortal experience, and it thus returns us to an inescapable theoretical problem. Walter Ong has postulated that “the connection between writing and death is very deep, so deep that it registers almost always in the unconscious or subconscious rather than in consciousness.”³⁶ The relationship between death and writing opens upon questions of grammatology and metaphysics; it partakes of the ceaseless interplay between Eros and Thanatos, shaping the exchange between self and other in the symbolic articulation of desire. Its contemplation leads us into the domains of psychology, theology, and anthropology as well as aesthetics and literary theory. Noting that writing is often metaphorically related to death (“The letter kills but the spirit gives life,” 2 Corinthians 3:6), Ong comments on this complex reciprocity:

One of the most startling paradoxes inherent in writing is its close association with death. This association is suggested in Plato's charge that writing is inhuman, thing-like, and that it destroys memory. … In Pippa Passes, Robert Browning calls attention to the still widespread practice of pressing living flowers to death between the pages of printed books, “faded yellow blossoms / twixt page and page.” The dead flower, once alive, is the psychic equivalent of the verbal text. The paradox lies in the fact that the deadness of the text, its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid visual fixity, assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrected into limitless living contexts by a potentially infinite number of living readers.³⁷

Indeed, we might say that the desire to write originates in the paradox that the death of writing—the fixed “body” of the text, as it were—insures the life of its spirit or sense. It is a commonplace that writing has an existence independent of its author, but Ong locates an additional truth: that writing incarnates the very principle of life in its removal from the carnal world of time, change, and death.

While the finality of death creates in the self that desire for symbolic transcendence which culminates in the temporal activity of writing, inscription must be seen—also paradoxically—as an effacement of self and an escape from the temporal order. Blanchot speaks of writing as a “surrender to the fascination of time's absence,” in which the self becomes another, immersed in the solitude of “a language which no one speaks, which is addressed to no one, which has no center, and which reveals nothing.” Though writing conventionally manifests an object and figures a relationship between speaker and audience, Blanchot explores the inner world of pure language, the “space of literature,” in which writing consumes the writer and discloses its “incessant” demands. As an “interminable,” never-to-be-completed project, writing invisibly alters the writer's relationship to death: “The fact that the writer's task ends with his life hides another fact: that, through this task, his life slides into the distress of the infinite.”³⁸ In a sense, the writer exchanges one kind of anxiety for another; the distress of the infinite replaces the fear of human finitude. But the writer's distress at the boundlessness of his task finds its compensation in the discovery that writing transforms death into an ally. The nullity of death gives writing a means of understanding its own imperative nature; it constitutes the blank tablet upon which writing inscribes its resistance to the indifference of time. Death enforces the rule of absence which creates the need for symbolic expression; its inexorability becomes the vital insistence of writing. And so writing may be said to derive its life from death, paradoxically achieving its energy through an emulation of death—through a retreat from the formlessness of lived experience into the fixed and silent world of the unspeaking word that will always speak.

A second text from “Tales of the Folio Club” makes this complex exchange intelligible through a figuration of the writer's relationship to death. Conventionally “MS. Found in a Bottle” has been regarded as a precursor to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in its projection of a symbolic voyage from commonplace reality toward a fantastic realm of death. David Halliburton, however, has touched on the self-referentiality of “MS.” in calling for a study of writing in Poe:

No one seems to have noticed Poe's stages in the sequence, from oral to chirographic to typographic, of verbal expression. This is not the place to examine such a complex problem in detail. Yet we cannot help observing that here [in “MS.”] … the narrative is in the form of a manuscript, and that a central act in the story—the drawing of the word Discovery—is closely related to the act of composing in script.³⁹

In his elaborate reading of Pym as a figurative quest for the origin of writing, John Irwin has noted that “MS.” partakes of the same quest insofar as it amounts to “a fiction of its own origin as writing.”⁴⁰ This may be so, but in another way “MS.” also contemplates the closure of language and thus enacts a theory of textual destiny—the end of inscription. It thus affords at least a tentative model of the life of writing and the fate of the writing self.

Such a reading is invited by the fact that the tale is intrinsically a fable of composition, imaging the perils of inscription. Shortly after the narrative breaks into diary fragments, the writer refers self-consciously to the production of his text, which begins with the purloining of pen and paper: “I ventured into the captain's own private cabin, and took thence the materials with which I write, and have written.” The iteration of the key verb in the present and present perfect tenses implies a continuity of activity, a sustaining of both writing and the “I” who writes. The narrator wishes to preserve both the manuscript and the self inscribed therein: “I shall from time to time continue this journal. It is true that I may not find an opportunity of transmitting it to the world, but I will not fail to make the endeavor. At the last moment I will enclose the MS. in a bottle, and cast it within the sea” (CW, 2:142). But even an account jettisoned at the last moment can never be complete; as Irwin observes of Pym: “The narrative of one's own life is always unfinished, a fragment in which meaningful closure is either a fictionalized foreshadowing or a postscript in another hand.”⁴¹ With this reference to the “transmitting” of the journal, Poe accounts for its physical existence while placing it within a new mode of coherence, as an unfinished text, literally the interrupted testimony of a doomed man. That is, Poe claims for the story the privileged status of the deathbed utterance; the authority of the discourse derives from the proximity of death, while its fascination lies in the idea that the putative writer of these lines is now already dead. The posteriority of the text reifies a truth about all writing: inscription is inherently a sign of the writer's absence; notation speaks for a self that cannot, in the moment of reading, speak to the reader.

However, in the moment of writing—at least as fictionally represented—the narrator perceives his immediate problem as revelation rather than survival. Sensing that the ship is “hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge—some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction” (145), he thinks of writing as a desperate transmission of forbidden intelligence. Because this exciting knowledge entails death, the effort of inscription is both irresistible and futile. The narrator is compelled to record his impressions by the human need to achieve coherency of experience through language, yet the very object of language, the never-to-be-imparted secret, lies beyond the reach of words.

And so Poe situates inscription between two conflicting attitudes about death. The narrator feels an eagerness for the discovery which means destruction, but he conversely registers his terror and despair and tries to describe “the horror of [his] sensations” as he moves toward extinction. His voyage is a prolonged nightmare of death anxiety, a crisis of imminent annihilation. When the trading ship of Malabar teak is wrecked by a storm, the narrator faces not only the physical threat of death but ubiquitous images of mortality as well. The sun itself seems to expire: “Just before sinking within the turgid sea, its central fires suddenly went out, as if hurriedly extinguished by some unaccountable power” (138). The narrator describes himself and his companions as “enshrouded in pitchy darkness,” and he then reports: “All around were horror, and thick gloom, and a black sweltering desert of ebony” (139). The stillness of the sea is indirectly compared to death through an allusion to methods of verifying the absence of life: “The flame of a candle burned upon the poop without the least perceptible motion, and a long hair, held between the finger and thumb, hung without the possibility of detecting a vibration” (136). That the tale symbolizes a movement toward corporeal dissolution Poe makes plain in depicting the phantom ship that carries the narrator toward the vortex. Manned by spectral figures, “ghosts of buried centuries” who epitomize old age and corruption, this “terrible ship” represents a condition of death-in-life that anticipates the House of Usher. Its “worm-eaten” frame illustrates the “rottenness attendant upon age” and hence the principle of decay. The unintelligible “foreign tongue” spoken by the phantom crew reminds us that they inhabit an alien realm, Shakespeare's “undiscovered country, from whose bourne no traveller returns.”

Confronted with signs of aging and death, the narrator writes and thereby deflects the primal horror of his situation by imposing the mediation of a written text. His response illustrates the truth of Ernest Becker's contention that “the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.” Recasting Freud's basic theory, Becker adds, “Consciousness of death is the primary repression, not sexuality. … This is what is creaturely about man, this is the repression on which culture is built, a repression unique to the self-conscious animal.”⁴² Facing annihilation, Poe's narrator buries himself (so to speak) in his writing and so reenacts the repression on which culture is built. Both participant and spectator, he is at once caught in the current of mortality and freed from it by his scribal activity, which involves both a displacement of the self (the “I” of subjective experience becoming the “I” of writing) and a subjugation of death to the conventions of discourse. As the narrator realizes, this is a temporary and perhaps illusory expedient; yet as long as he can write, he guarantees his survival. Just as his voice is literally a function of Poe's narrative, so his fictional existence coincides with the boundaries of the text he is said to inscribe. In his movement toward death, the narrator sustains himself through writing much as Scheherazade preserves herself through the telling of tales in The Thousand and One Nights. Each sentence is a deferral of the end of writing, a strategy of denial.⁴³

The other view of death manifested in “MS.” is no less pervasive in Poe's fiction—that is, the inherent longing to penetrate the mysterium tremendum, to satisfy the wish to die that forms the counterpart of death anxiety. Curiously, Poe's protagonists are both repulsed by putrefaction and driven to know the secret of mortality. The narrator of “MS.” yearns to discover “the mysteries of these awful regions” even though the attempt may disclose “the most hideous aspect of death” (145). Like the spirit crew of the phantom ship, he approaches the great vortex with an attitude partaking “more of the eagerness of hope than of the apathy of despair.” His desire perhaps stems from the urge to communicate the incommunicable or to write the impossible sentence. In effect he wishes to say with Monsieur Valdemar, one of Poe's later adventurers into the abyss, “I am dead.” The will to project the life of words across the gulf of mortality, to speak the literally unspeakable, represents (as Roland Barthes has remarked) a “scandal of language” which violates both the rules of discourse and the taboos which isolate and repress the phenomenon of death.⁴⁴

This quintessential desire to plumb the abyss—and write about it—converts the action of “MS.” into an uncanny prefiguration of Poe's life as a writer. What are his subsequent texts but reformulations of the same voyage? Can we not say that Poe conceived of writing as a series of messages from the edge of silence—fragmentary glimpses of the one experience which cannot be written about in the past tense? The narrator of “MS.” writes to forestal death, yet his every word carries him toward the threshold of silence. With some alarm we recognize that all inscription—including the text on this page—partakes of the same irreversible movement. Poe suggests that the desire of writing lies in the inscrutability of silence, which induces both approach and avoidance. One seeks both to defer the experience of silence and to grasp its tacit meaning. To carry out this impossible project, the narrator intends to enclose his manuscript in a bottle and cast it into the sea at the last moment, at the instant in which fate suspends the task of writing. The incompletion of the text will thereby become a sign of human finitude, a reminder of the inevitable lapse from language into silence.

As a metaphor for the project of writing, “MS.” enables us to contemplate Poe's poetry and fiction as a protracted manuscript-in-a-bottle, an inexorable movement toward a final text—appropriately, in Poe's case, an unfinished manuscript called “The Light-House,” that solitary tower at the margin of silence. Yet each text within this unfolding sequence also marks a resistance to silence, a defiance of the process by which the will to write is exhausted. Language performs a double role in this self-consuming quest; it provides the possibilities of discourse but also sets the bounds of disclosure. Or, to use the opposition suggested by Barthes (in terms especially relevant to the voyage metaphor), language forms a horizon, which implies both a boundary and a perspective, a limit and a looking-through.⁴⁵ The narrator of “MS.” faces the intrinsic dilemma of writing: he may record his anticipations or he may plunge into the vortex, but having done the latter he cannot return to the world of words. Language carries him to the brink of insight, but he must surrender the signifier to achieve that unmediated signified which resides in silence. The mystery that he seeks to reveal cannot be placed in a bottle, which as a metaphor for language both preserves and constricts meaning. Enough of the manuscript is completed to infer the reason for its inconclusion, yet the final lines tease us with the imminence of discovery: “But little time will be left me to ponder upon my destiny! The circles rapidly grow small—we are plunging madly within the grasp of the whirlpool—and amid a roaring, and bellowing, and thundering of ocean and of tempest, the ship is quivering—oh God! and—going down!” (146). The sudden suspension of writing signals the narrator's penetration of the void beyond language, his apprehension of the never-to-be-imparted secret.

The beginning of “MS.” curiously anticipates its ending. Among his asseverations about truth and imagination, the narrator notes that he has long regarded “the reveries of fancy” as “a dead letter and a nullity.” As his narrative moves from mundane fact to unrepressed, primal fear, the narrator indeed approaches that nullity or nothingness in which the letter as signifier is “dead.” The manuscript itself is a dead letter both in the sense of being undeliverable (it is addressed to anyone and no one) and also unreturnable (the writer's death is implied by its existence). The very act of writing is also defined as an absence (an undisclosable secret) which cancels the inscription; the writer has no way of delivering in a letter or through the system of letters the “exciting knowledge” he expects to find. The paradox of writing is analogous to the problem of describing the phantom ship that carries him along: “What she is not, I can easily perceive; what she is, I fear it is impossible to say” (142).

When he composed “MS.” in 1831 or 1832, Poe had barely launched his career as a writer of magazine fiction; yet his narrative seems remarkably prophetic as an allegory of the life of writing. I do not mean to represent this figurality as a conscious forecast of his literary fate; rather it occurs as an intuitive projection of the attraction-repulsion mechanism at the crux of Poe's response to death. Writing apparently functioned for him as a diversion from melancholy, as an exploration of anxiety, and as a mode of discovery and analysis. He could simultaneously manage his dread through imaginative play—sometimes converting it to an object of satire—and construct speculative versions of death experience. Now haunted by the figure of the Red Death, now probing the spirit world through mesmeric revelation, Poe embraced the life of writing as a saving response to the consciousness of his own mortality and to disorienting changes in the contemporary meaning of death.

But when he composed “MS.,” Poe had other, more immediate concerns as well: he was then in the process of devising his “Tales of the Folio Club,” the collection which was to establish his place in the world of letters. Without much question, Poe conceived the sea story on one level as a tour de force, a display of his ability to blend horror and verisimilitude in the manner of popular sea narratives. He even invented a fictitious author for the piece, “Mr. Solomon Seadrift,” whose name suggests parodic intent. The recognition of this satiric framework seems at first glance to undercut the idea of “MS.” as an allegory of writing. Yet when we recall that the narrator's manuscript afforded an escape from the doom which constitutes its subject, the apparent contradiction resolves itself. Or, to recast our metaphorical terms one last time, we might say that the external shape of the tale (the potboiler sea story) and its conceptual message (the relationship between writing and death) exist as bottle and manuscript. The transparent form contains and preserves the record of an unfinished voyage.

Poe's own voyage extended sixteen years beyond the appearance of “MS. Found in a Bottle.” Yet in some ways he never escaped its prescient metaphoricity: for Poe as for his fictive narrator, writing unfolded between dread and fascination, alternately functioning as a deferral of death and as an incursion into its domain. Significantly, in that early tale the manuscript assumes an autonomous life of its own: writing survives the writer, and set against the problematic phenomena it purports to register and inventory, it inscribes a truth that is self-revealing rather than referential. The text creates a space of discovery whose true horizon lies both beyond and within the rim of the polar sea. In a provocative essay Joseph Riddel argues that in Poe “an abyss has opened up between word and world” and that this rupture marks the origination of “a new literature, a self-critical or self-annihilating textual performance—the poem/story and even the critical essay (as performance) that deconstructs itself.”⁴⁶ Poe was perhaps the first American writer to interiorize the disintegration of what Derrida has called “logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence.” Through Poe's recurrent perception of a gap between phenomenal reality and meaning grounded in language—a break which finds its consummate expression in the discontinuity between death's physical horror and its putative purpose in a theological scheme—he committed himself to a relentless questioning of truth and language. Within the chasm or abyss, that insistent figure of unfathomable death, Poe located the origin of that abyss to which Riddel refers, the cleavage between sign and referent, which has itself become the sign of literary modernism.

Though we have attended more closely in this chapter to the cultural history of death than to the emergence of modernist writing (to be sketched in chapter 7), we can nevertheless begin to see that Poe's texts mark a point of convergence. Both death anxiety and the perception of death as catastrophe date from a relatively recent period in Western experience, an epoch that roughly coincides with the emergence of a new sense of writing. Derrida provides insight into the intricate process by which the crisis in Western metaphysics revealed itself in the displacement of speech by writing: he contends that inscription is the sign of a vanished presence, an originary Logos, without which the relationship between word and world falls into chaos. As writing effects a divorce from phenomenal reality, determinate meaning becomes problematic; language reveals itself as a play of differences, having reference only to itself and its textual imperatives. The apotheosis of writing coincides with the disappearance of God—and not by chance, since writing in the modern sense begins by declaring the loss of a transcendental signified and takes upon itself the task of supplanting the eternal Word with endless words. Indeed, Derrida views inscription as a violent usurpation of immanence, a killing of the spirit:

What writing itself, in its nonphonetic moment, betrays, is life. It menaces at once the breath, the spirit, and history as the spirit's relationship with itself. It is their end, their finitude, their paralysis. Cutting breath short, sterilizing or immobilizing spiritual creation in the repetition of the letter, in the commentary or the exegesis, confined in a narrow space, reserved for a minority, it is the principle of death and of difference in the becoming of being.⁴⁷

Writing carries within itself “the principle of death” in its transformation of the verbal sign from a living utterance to a fixed mark on a lifeless page.

… [The] nineteenth-century crisis of death revealed to Poe both the inaccessibility of metaphysical truth and the implications of that cosmic blankness for the writing and the reading of texts. The perceived collapse of logocentrism created a strange rapprochement between writing and death, since both had previously derived their signifying power from the presence of a divine Logos. In losing its relationship to a transcendental signified, writing became more conscious of its deathlike nature (as the sign of an absence) and more uncertain of its own capacity to represent truth. Meanwhile death invaded writing as it besieged Western consciousness, manifesting its ascendancy in literature and philosophy (one thinks of Poe's contemporary, Kierkegaard), already beginning to assume the godlike proportions it would attain in twentieth century. Oddly enough, the ascendancy of death conferred upon writing an important new function: since, as Ong observes, “writing carries within it always an element of death,” it endows the writing self with a certain control over death: “Such is the virtue of texts … that their ability to absorb death makes death somehow less threatening. For, as already noted, the text assures a kind of life after death, which can readily be disguised as life without death.”⁴⁸ As Poe perceived from the beginning—and bodied forth in “MS. Found in a Bottle”—writing held out the possibility of life, especially as it embraced the catastrophe of death.

Notes

1. John R. Reed, Victorian Conventions (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1975), 171.

2. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977; New York: Avon Books, 1978), 1. Deathbed scenes in Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and others come under discussion in Garrett Stewart, Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 55-138.

3. Edgar Allan Poe, Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 2:318. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent references to Poe's works will be to the Mabbott edition, hereafter cited as CW. Poe's first version of “Ligeia” (1838) contained only a brief paragraph on the heroine's death. In 1845 he expanded the scene to three paragraphs which included “The Conqueror Worm,” a lyric Poe had published separately in 1843.

4. See especially the chapter “Writing Restructures Consciousness” in Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982), 78-116.

5. Edward H. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 106, 113.

6. Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Olson, Living and Dying (New York: Bantam, 1974), 3-21; Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: The Free Press. 1973), 11-24.

7. Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), 473.

8. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 249.

9. Ibid., 68.

10. Ibid., 70.

11. The Hour of Our Death, 405.

12. Family, Sex and Marriage, 247.

13. John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 92, 93.

14. Family, Sex and Marriage, 251.

15. Ibid., 248.

16. Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward DEATH: From the Middle Ages to the Present (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 72.

17. Stanley French, “The Cemetery as Cultural Institution: The Establishment of Mount Auburn and the ‘Rural Cemetery’ Movement,” in Death in America, ed. David E. Stannard (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), 78-79.

18. Death and the Enlightenment, 349.

19. Family, Sex and Marriage, 247.

20. See the exhibition catalogue by Anita Schorsch, Mourning Becomes America: Mourning Art in the New Nation (Harrisburg, Pa.: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1976).

21. Victorian Conventions, 157-58.

22. James Stevens Curl, The Victorian Celebration of Death (Devon, England: David & Charles, 1972), 1-26. See also John Morley, Death, Heaven and the Victorians (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), 19-31.

23. The Feminization of American Culture, 242.

24. I have characterized the modern age as “post-Christian” in the sense defined by Alan D. Gilbert: “A post-Christian society is not one from which Christianity has departed, but one in which it has become marginal. It is a society where to be irreligious is to be normal, where to think and act in secular terms is to be conventional, where neither status nor respectability depends upon the practice or profession of religious faith.” See The Making of Post-Christian Britain: A History of the Secularization of Modern Society (London: Longman, 1980), ix.

25. David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 185.

26. Washington Irving, The Sketch Book, in History, Tales and Sketches, ed. James W. Tuttleton (New York: Library of America, 1983), 1047.

27. James Fenimore Cooper, The Prairie (1827; reprint, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1950), 446.

28. Ibid., 451.

29. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (New York: Library of America, 1982), 95.

30. Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Poems (New York: George A. Leavitt, 1841), 127-28.

31. The Feminization of American Culture, 17-93.

32. Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1342

33. See Claude Richard, “Les Contes du Folio Club et la Vocation Humoristique d’Edgar Allan Poe,” in Configuration Critique d’Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Claude Richard (Paris: Minard, 1969), 79-96; Alexander Hammond, “Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of the Folio Club: The Evolution of a Lost Book,” Library Chronicle 41 (1976): 13-43.

34. A. H. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York: Appleton-Century, 1941), 215.

35. Poe: A Critical Study, 115.

36. Walter J. Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 235.

37. Orality and Literacy, 81.

38. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 26, 30.

39. David Halliburton, Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 251-52.

40. John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 69.

41. Ibid., 235.

42. The Denial of Death, ix, 96. Becker would seem to argue that all cultures, in all ages, have been built upon dread and the repression of death. Yet his focus is clearly upon the modern period, with Kierkegaard and Freud as prototypical figures.

43. Focusing upon the tactics of Scheherazade, Wendy B. Faris discusses the effort in modern texts to “simulate the postponement of human death through the prolongation of fictional life,” in “1001 Words: Fiction Against Death,” Georgia Review 36 (Winter 1982): 811-30.

44. Roland Barthes, “Textual Analysis of a Tale by Edgar Poe,” trans. Donald G. Marshall, Poe Studies 10 (June 1977): 10.

45. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 9.

46. Joseph N. Riddel, “The ‘Crypt’ of Edgar Poe,” Boundary 2 7 (Spring 1979): 120, 124.

47. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 25.

48. Interfaces of the Word, 238.