SOURCE: Hume, Beverly A. “Poe's Mad Narrator in Eureka.” Essays in Arts and Sciences 22 (October 1993): 51-65.

[In the following essay, Hume refutes criticism that assumes that Poe himself is the narrator of Eureka, and suggests rather that the narrator is a madman created by Poe.]

Edgar Allan Poe's critics generally regard Eureka as seminal to a proper understanding not only of the anomalies in Poe's poetic and prose fictions, but also of the metaphysics or philosophy which informs them. Here, however, agreement ends. Some argue that Eureka reveals a concern for moral or theological issues; others that it offers a romantic nihilism or materialism; and still others that it mocks both philosophical and scientific inquiry.¹ Critics differ also on primary sources for Eureka, and Poe is variously credited with relying on the early cosmogonic poetry of the Greeks; on Alexander Von Humboldt's then popular Cosmos; on scientific thought accessible to the general nineteenth-century reading public; on Christian philosophy, particularly natural theology; and on the theories of Newton and Laplace, to name a few.² The source of such differences seems to lie in whether one regards Eureka as Poe's final philosophical statement about the nature of being or as a hodge-podge of ideas which obscurely mirror Poe's confused sentiments about a variety of subjects ranging from scientific method to the follies of man; from poetic inspiration to dogmatic theology.

In this essay, I argue that although Poe's relation to the central narrator of Eureka is ambiguous, the cosmogonic theory of this work calls into question the bizarre metaphysics of other of Poe's works, particularly those narrated by seeming madmen. Numerous critics have already drawn analogies between the romantic cosmogony of Eureka and earlier of Poe's works, such as “The Fall of the House of Usher” or “Descent Into the Maelström,” but few have used it to clarify the “metaphysics” of such narratives as “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.”³ I will demonstrate, however, that the primary or central narrator of Eureka is not only unique among Poe's most insane narrators, but also that the nature of his madness is the most cleverly concealed. Despite his claims to coherence and intuitive knowledge, Poe's narrator in Eureka presents his theory of the universe in a repetitive and heavily punctuated manner which not only reveals the frenzied nature of his vision,⁴ but, by extension, any literary romantic who would be a scientist.

Because Eureka was first presented as a two-and-a-half-hour lecture called “The Universe” at the New York Society Library four months before it was published and because Poe insisted upon the truth, integrity, and beauty of this “prose poem,” some of his twentieth-century critics assume that the narrative voice in Eureka is Poe's and that he was presenting material to an audience who understood and accepted these views as his own.⁵ However, even a cursory consideration of the work and of Poe's reviewers reveals that the reactions of his contemporaries were mixed. Although, as Joan Dayan points out, reviews in the Morning Courier and New York Enquirer and in the 1850 Southern Literary Messenger praised Poe and his visionary genius in Eureka before (and after) his death (13), a reviewer for the 1848 Boston Transcript imagined that he saw the “mocking smile of the hoaxer … behind [Poe's] grave mask,” while another in an 1848 Home Journal wrote that there “was no great novelty in the scientific ideas advanced,” and a third for an 1848 Amherst College Indicator wrote, “We have read [Eureka] quite through, and it is our conviction that this time, Mr. Poe has egregiously hoaxed—not his readers—but himself” (Critical Heritage 280-292).

Equally ambivalent to many of Poe's past and present readers is the author's attitude toward his narrators, especially his mad ones. Although nearly all of Poe's narrators have seemed, to some degree, mad to various critics, “madness” seems to have been a problematic concept for Poe. After writing Eureka, for example, Poe offered some distinctions between genius (“the result of generally large mental power existing in a state of absolute proportion”) and “‘genius’ in the popular sense—which is but the manifestation of the abnormal predominance of some one faculty over all the others” and “is a result of mental disease or rather, of organic malformation of mind” (Fifty Suggestions 23, 490). Such diseased beings, Poe further observes, create works that “are never sound in themselves and, in especial, always betray the general mental insanity” (490). In an earlier “Marginalia,” however, Poe wrote that the “fate of an individual gifted, or rather accursed, with an intellect very far superior to that of his race” would be that he “would be considered a madman” (“Marginalia” 247, 388), and it is tempting to speculate, as does Burton Pollin, that “Poe thought of himself as this abnormally gifted individual” (388).

The nature of this problem is perhaps most tellingly revealed by Poe's Roderick Usher who, in pronouncing the narrator of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” a “madman,” forever draws into question not only the narrator's rationality, but the nature of the phenomena he claims to have witnessed. Poe's ambivalence toward the popular and real nature of madness enabled him, I believe, to create many literary madmen who, like both his narrators in Eureka, invariably insist upon the truth of their visions even as their narratives undermine such truths. The difference between such madmen and the primary narrator of Eureka lies in Poe's development of the latter as a writer of prose and of poetry, one who attempts to convince his readers that he has used intuition, Newtonian science, and his intimations of eternity and divinity to discover the true relation between physical and spiritual realms. However, the resulting romantic scientism that pervades his narrative not only obscures the relation between madness, art, and science, but also reveals, finally, the narrator's bizarre and monmaniacal apprehension of a sadistic god and cosmos, one as, if not more, perverse than that envisioned by the narrator of “The Black Cat.”

In their recent studies of Poe, Joan Dayan and Michael J. S. Williams offer not only complementary summaries of the significance of Eureka to Poe's works, but also suggest why, for many modern critics, Poe “writes a cosmology that totters between farce and revelation” (Dayan 23). To Dayan, Poe “speaks excess and bombast in order to convert his readers to a more difficult, if less grandiose habit of mind” (24), offering both an attack and implicit philosophical alternative to “those who busy themselves in attempts at the unattainable” (29). Dayan argues further that in Eureka, Poe is involved in a “radical decentering” of language to make “us doubt our previous assumptions, and … to see language in its condition of mereness reduced before the very grandeurs Poe calls forth” (44). For Williams, similarly, “Eureka asserts that human existence is irreducibly inscrutable, and that language both allows us what we know of the world and paradoxically displaces us from it—inaugurating a desire that it necessarily frustrates” (151). Acknowledging the “possibility that the narrator's enterprise may itself be a product of monomania” and that Eureka offers a partially “satiric subversion” of “man's attempts to conceive a universal explanation” (150), Williams contends that Poe's narrator stages a conscious, even sophisticated, attack on systems of language, of thought, and that he (the narrator) mirrors Poe's sentiments.

These studies, along with other recent commentaries on Eureka, reveal the contemporary tendency of Poe's critics not only to take his narrator too seriously, but also to assume that Poe did too. “What I have propounded in Eureka,” Poe wrote to George Eveleth in 1848, “will (in good time) revolutionize Physical and Metaphysical Science” (Letters 2: 362). Although such a statement implies that Poe was intellectually serious in Eureka, a close reading of his “prose poem” suggests that the “revolution” he proposes to Eveleth is related to the creation of a narrator who, with the help of then-contemporary science, madly envisions a perversely materialistic and self-annihilating universe and god. For in Eureka, Poe creates a narrator, a nineteenth-century mad scientist of sorts who, in his attempts to understand his universe, not only becomes, like other of Poe's mad narrators, confused by his own designs, but resorts finally to a telling and near-hysterical theoretical digression about divinely sanctioned sado-masochism and the absolute necessity of evil and suffering to human existence.

Although Eureka has been summarized many times, its chaotic texture requires its readers to unravel its plot at the same time as they analyze it. This interpretive problem accounts, in part, for the conflicting perceptions of the meaning of the narrative. Poe's narrator begins his epistle with the construction of a second epistle, one from a second, “anonymous” author who is presumably writing in the year 2848 a.d. and who extravagantly praises intuition, mocks “crawling” scientific methods of the past (Poetry and Tales 1264-5), and rages against mathematical logic. This narrative is subsequently dismissed by the primary narrator as “chimerical” (1271), and the reader is then offered this narrator's vision: one which not only echoes the “anonymous” author's extravagant language, but makes even more astounding claims. The anonymous author attacks scientific method from Aristotle to Newton and beyond, while the primary narrator poses the argument that Newton's mathematically-derived principles, particularly his first law of gravity, are essentially correct, but can be arrived at by intuitive, rather than mathematical, means. Further, the central narrator argues, man may intuitively know all those inductions and deductions “of which the processes are so shadowy as to escape our consciousness, elude our reason, or defy our capacity for expression” (1276-7).

The primary narrator also tends to view reality, or the cosmos, in terms of its dualistic, or polarized, nature. He remains fascinated, also, at the prospect of demonstrating the incompetence of both the tradition and methodology of science. For example, Newtonian mathematics, he asserts, merely demonstrates the same law that he has intuitively pronounced “correct”; it demonstrates the law “that all bodies attract each other with forces proportional with the quantities of matter and inversely proportional with the squares of their distances” (1283-4).

The narrator continues to postulate in Eureka that gravitation, attraction, the human body, and atoms are metaphors for matter, while electricity, repulsion, the soul, and ether are metaphors for spirit. Further, though an atom in Eureka seems initially to refer only to cosmic particles, this narrator determines that it signifies the smallest and largest particles in existence (which he does not name, insisting nonetheless that they can be both luminous and non-luminous), planetary systems, solar systems, galaxies, men, gravity, animals, and cells. In short, these particles can be anything which the narrator determines that they are, anything which he “senses” exists physically in the universe. Although the use of metaphor to describe the relation of the physical universe to spiritual realms would not have been startling to an informed nineteenth-century readership, Poe's narrator uses such metaphors primarily to reinterpret principles that have been mathematically-derived in order to demonstrate, paradoxically, the limitations of mathematics. He concludes this “scientific” vision as obscure voices from his memory reveal the central truth of his narrative: that there is a “Divine Being” who “passes His eternity in perpetual variation of Concentrated Self” and “Infinite Diffusion” and all existing matter and all existing spirit are but this being's “present expansive existence,” an existence which must necessarily move back to the concentrated “One” from which it began (1358).

This narrator's theory seems to partake of two characteristic, but conflicting nineteenth-century approaches to understanding the cosmos: (1) reductionism or elementarism, in which emphasis was placed on reducing “the complex to the simple by an emphasis on a basic element or unit”; and (2) holism or field theories in which “total structures or contexts (wholes) were used to explain the action of the parts embedded in them” (Hilgard 12).⁶ For such a narrator, as Paul Valéry early surmised, the universe seems to be “formed on a plan the profound symmetry of which is present, as it were in the inner structure of the mind” (17). Unity, or the principle of oneness, according to Valéry and to other critics who regard Poe's narrator as visionary, becomes a central principle for such symmetry, while the universe becomes god's fiction, a pure and perfect design that is unlike human fiction which merely strives to imitate or recreate forgotten memory (1275). Despite his stated belief that as a man, he can only imperfectly recreate god's universe and also despite his intuitive dependence upon the “accidental” accuracy of Newtonian mathematics, this narrator madly plunges forward, using his intuition and his poetic vision to attain an absolute knowledge which he is certain (at least intuitively) lies somewhere beyond his comprehension.

According to many critics, however, Poe's narrator does successfully “sense” twentieth-century cosmogonic theories of the universe. He envisions, they claim, a universe which exploded from intensely compressed matter and expanded into existence, only to return to such a state—an apparently oscillating universe that consists of widely varied atomic particles (luminous and non-luminous). He envisions, they also maintain, a cosmos of dark voids where matter does not exist; of gravitational forces which are causing the universe to shrink and wear down; and of a solar system where the planet will eventually be consumed by an enlarged sun. Such cosmogonic notions, some critics suggest, can be “incorporated into fairly recent [scientific] concepts” (Valéry 20) such as the Big Bang universe, the steady-state universe, the oscillating universe, general and specific relativity, and black holes.⁷ Even critics who remain unconvinced tend to believe that Poe's narrator senses something; Poe's “science” becomes a “hit-and-miss hotchpotch, largely indebted to the work of Laplace, Newton, and Humboldt, and accidentally anticipative of the theories of Eddington, Einstein, and Meyerson” (Ketterer 47).

However, Poe's narrator in Eureka actually anticipates little, as his cosmogony is more clearly aligned with nineteenth than with twentieth-century science. Nineteenth-century scientists generally believed that the universe was finite, closed, and could eventually be explained. Similarly, Poe's narrator argues for a finite, closed cosmos in Eureka. In fact, he regards man's “cosmos” as itself a “Divine Being” or god (or sentient galaxy), one of many such closed and finite “Beings” who populate infinity infinitely. Although many of the insights of science have been accidental or developed from imaginative insight, none of them have been postulated as inanely as those of Poe's narrator. More like one of the figures in a twentieth-century absurdist drama, the “atomic” men described by the narrator of Eureka are more pathetic than powerful, more laughable than engaging. Like the narrator, they populate a universe already set in motion by an infallible, mechanistic, and self-fulfilling “god” who is composed of atoms, of matter, and whose essence, or spirituality, is atomic, material. Poe's narrator's intuitive leaps from the specific to the outrageously general, his perceptions of the contradictory nature of scientific insight, and his descriptions of an oscillating “Divine” universe (liberally sprinkled with dark voids and gravitational anomalies) all suggest, finally, that men can only vaguely apprehend the infinite, and then only through the intuition, not language—whether that of mathematics or of literature.

Despite its incommunicable nature, Poe's narrator zealously continues, man's intuition enables him to understand and to endure “Divine Injustice” and the horrors of human suffering. In the view that he has offered in Eureka, he states, “and in this view alone, we comprehend the riddle of Divine Injustice—of Inexorable Fate. In this view alone, the existence of Evil becomes intelligible; but in this view it becomes more—it becomes endurable” (1357). It becomes “endurable” because, in his view, all suffering, all evil, becomes spiritually meaningful since “All” is devoted to the continuation of a mathematically and mechanically symmmetic cosmos or god. Human depravity and death become, in such a view, part of a universal design, one where seemingly violent and arbitrary acts are willed by a perfect god who, claim the “voices” of the narrator's memory, “feels his life through an infinity of imperfect pleasures … the partial and pain-intertangled pleasures of those inconceivable numerous things which you designate as his creatures” (1358). Such violence is willed by this god's “atoms,” including man. “Our souls no longer rebel at a Sorrow,” observes the narrator, “which we ourselves have imposed upon ourselves, in furtherance of our own purposes—with a view—if even with a futile view—to the extension of our own Joy” (1375). Since the narrator's hedonistic pleasure and pain-seeking God is perfect, the man who looks inward can, as the narrator presumably does, intuitively know that all which seems “Evil” is actually part of a greater divine “Sorrow” and “Joy” and is necessary to sustain a continuously self-serving and eternal cosmos.

Such a “philosophy” embraces the idea that the universe is (as Newton and other eighteenth or nineteenth-century scientists might have agreed) mechanistic and materialistic, but, unlike such scientists, Poe's narrator also argues for the inevitable material or atomic dissolution of both the universal “Divine” and of humankind. His is a philosophy, then, which seems directly related to those posited by some of Poe's earlier, monomaniacal narrators. Not only are narrators in such works as “The Black Cat,” “Berenice,” or “The Tell-Tale Heart” inordinately preoccupied with the horrific, evil, insane, or perverse objects (such as evil eyes, strangely compelling teeth, and a black cat) in their fictive universes, but other narrators mock or indirectly ridicule such obsessions in humorous sketches such as “The Premature Burial,” “Loss of Breath,” “How To Write A Blackwood Article,” or “The Spectacles.” In these darker tales, whether parodic or horrifying, narrators or central characters look for a single reason or singular principle in order to explain their dilemmas or those of others. Their typically exaggerated, repetitive, dash-ridden, and mechanical language, when combined with their futile, histrionic posturing, makes them seem, like the narrator of Eureka, somewhere between the nightmare of annihilation and that of the equally unsettling world of grotesque literature—a world which, as Geoffrey Harpham summarizes, is “relatively easy to recognize … in a work of art,” but difficult to “apprehend … directly” since, at core, it lacks symbolic coherence (xvi).⁸

If “he” is nothing else, surely the “Divine Being” or god of Eureka is a grotesque figure. According to the narrator, this massive “Being” is both man and not-man, is forever collapsing and expanding, and is directly responsible for not only the joys of existence, but the horrors, not only the presence of human pain and sorrow, but of what humans perceive as “good” and “evil”:

The absolute irrelative particle primarily created by the Volition of God, must have been in a condition of positive normality, or rightfulness—for wrong implies relation. Right is positive; wrong is negative—is merely the negation of right; as cold is the negation of heat—darkness of light

(1297).

Here, normalcy is equated with rightness, with goodness, with what is positive. Abnormality, on the other hand, is associated with an abstract wrongness, with evil, with negation. This simplistic cosmic equation is offered to the reader, however, to explain the narrator's perception of the absolutely “moral” structure of the universe which, like his understanding of the Newtonian principle of reaction, depends upon a rigidly mechanistic and polarized cosmos; a cosmos similar to others perceived by earlier of Poe's narrators such as those in “Berenice,” “The Black Cat,” or “The Tell-Tale Heart”—all mad narrators who, to their destruction, envision some manifestation of the physical universe in conspiracy against them.

Indeed, in such bleak narratives as “The Tell-Tale Heart” or “The Black Cat,” there remain nagging suggestions that the narrator's murderous and self-destructive actions are cosmically sanctioned: “I heard all things in the heaven and the earth. I heard many things in hell,” writes the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “How then am I mad?” (555); “Yet I am not more sure,” observes the narrator of “The Black Cat,” “that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man” (599). If madness is not a matter of acute sensibility, if perversity is not one of the “indivisible primary faculties” of a primordial unity (similar to that posited by the narrator of Eureka), then, these narrators query, how else are their fates to be explained? Such narrators use such single-minded theories to argue that their pathological and self-destructive behavior is not only natural but part of a cosmic design which, in terms of their narrative, it proves to be.

Although Eureka is ostensibly concerned with the beginning and the end of the cosmos, Poe's narrator is more concerned about delineating what he perceives as his present relation to the cosmos, to god. In so doing, he uncovers, he believes, a present which is continuous and simultaneous with the beginning and end of everything. Because of the limitations of human language, such a divine design, he claims, is not to be confused with human designs; that is, with fictive designs. For “in human constructions, a particular cause has a particular effect” while in “Divine constructions the object is either design or object as we choose to regard it—and we may take at any time a cause for an effect, or the converse—so that we can never absolutely decide which is which” (1341). At the same time, the difference between what is divine and what is merely human is crucial to the narrator's mad cosmogony in Eureka. Since he believes that language was created by man to explain his (rather than “His”) relation to the cosmos, all language-based explanations, including mathematical ones, remain imperfect. All fiction (including his own) is a lie, a distortion.

Like the mad narrators of “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator of Eureka searches for cause and effect relations in the cosmos even as he proclaims that they do not exist. Also, like these monomaniacal narrators, his language confusedly suggests that men choose their fates, that some other force which they do not understand works through them to bring them toward inevitable doom. In the case of the narrator of Eureka, that doom comes with his final delusory vision or “memory” of voices which tell him that everything in the universe, including himself, is part of a finite but eternal god who has an inordinate, if not perverse, appetite for pleasure and pain.

In Eureka, Poe's narrator tries to communicate his intuitive vision of man's relation to the universe, but concludes that the most distinctive quality of that vision is its refusal to be communicated. What the reader is left with, then, is a fragmented philosophical scientism which passionately attempts to justify horror, suffering, evil, and annihilation in terms of a mathematical and mechanical god, one who has his own amoral reasons for creating human sorrow and joy, pleasure and pain. The gothic elements of Poe's earlier tales of terror may tend to mask the implicit cosmological views that their narrators sometimes embrace, but the narrator of Eureka reveals fully the language-based nature of his madness.

Although it may be too much to argue, as John Irwin has, that Eureka reveals Poe's thinly-veiled “death wish” (21), the unusual nature of this narrative suggests that Poe rejected, perhaps even detested, the metaphysical implications of the cosmic speculations of some of his more driven narrators. Examining the linguistic collapse in both his narrators in Eureka, Poe does, as Gerald J. Kennedy suggests, anticipate the linguistic anxieties Eveleth often associated with literary modernism. More than this, however, Poe reveals that “madness” can lie in language itself, that textual meaning does depend upon a certain metaphoric consistency, and that despite its symbolic nature, mathematical language (and the discoveries of science) may be incompatible with poetic understanding. That is, the intuitive leaps of scientists who construct cosmogonic theories of the universe may be as fallible as those posited by literary romantics.

Desiring to make a strong case for intuition and against the “crawling,” mathematically-based methods of scientific inquiry into the nature of the universe, the narrators of Eureka inadvertently do the opposite, while Poe's own position remains provocatively ambivalent. More specifically, what Poe's central narrator demonstrates is that while a scientist's mathematical equations may be accurate, that same scientist's intuition or apprehension about the cosmic significance of these equations is no more or less reliable than that of the romantic poet. Poe, as D. H. Lawrence early suggests, seems like a scientist in his detailed and detached burrowings into human consciousnessness (61). However, in his portrait of the impassioned and erratic narrative voice(s) and vision(s) of Eureka, Poe offers, finally, a mocking portrait of the romantic writer as cosmogonic scientist, and vice versa. He also offers the implicit view that the synthesis of nineteenth-century science cosmogony and nineteenth-century American literary romanticism was inevitable, but could lead only to a chimerical view of the universe (and its atoms) as self-generating, amoral, materialistic, self-annihilating, and perverse—rather like the fictive universe envisioned by Thomas Pynchon's narrator in Gravity's Rainbow.

After discussing Poe's “full scale decreationism” in Eureka, in fact, and the “preoccupation with entropy in [postmodern American] apocalyptic” literature, James Tuttleton observes, “It is but a small step from the view that life is a nightmare of insane horrors to the view that this world deserves annihilation” (52). It similarly takes a short leap of illogic, as the narrator of Eureka reveals, from the view that there is a relation between mathematics and human consciousness to the view that this relation is sadistic, or at least painful—that man, in cooperation with a finite universe and god has “created” or “sensed” cosmic truths largely because they explain, logically, his cyclical and violent movement from being into nothingness and back again.

Like so many of Poe's mad narrators, the central narrator of Eureka not only determines that the universe works against human designs, but also that these designs, paradoxically, reveal a dark process both of self and cosmic annihilation. The revolution in physics and metaphysics that Poe envisioned in Eureka and promised Eveleth has not yet come, for Poe seems indirectly to have been envisioning not a revolution but rather an evolution in consciousness. That is, his primary narrator's madness directs Poe's readers toward the recognition that there is not and never has been a significant relation between human intuition and mathematically-based scientific inquiry. Implicitly, then, Poe seems to use the narrative of Eureka to suggest that the evolution of humankind will depend not only upon a rejection of the mathematically-based insights of then-contemporary Newtonian (or classical) science about the nature of the universe, but also upon a startling, new understanding of the profoundly complex nature of the relationship between human consciousness and the universe—an understanding which, as Poe's first “chimerical” narrator in Eureka postulates from 2848 a.d., will not even begin until some time short of a thousand more years of scientific, of human, ineptitude.⁹

Notes

1. For example, Douglas Robinson argues that Eureka is a “deistic revision of Christian eschatology” (257); while Joan Dayan maintains that in Eureka, Poe's “rigorously indeterminate philosophy comes to be inseparable from a severely Calvinist theology” (19); G. R. Thompson argues that Eureka “presents a skepticism that results from the appalling possibility that the essence of the universe is neither creative nor destructive in any design—but simply void” (189), and Peter C. Page analyzes Poe's debt to Empedocles.

2. For example, Peter C. Page suggests that Poe's source is the Greek trickster-cosmologer Empedocles and that Poe is mocking the narrator (21); John Irwin assumes that Eureka is based on Humboldt's Cosmos; and Barton Levi St. Armand cites Margaret Alterton's 1925 study of Poe (Origins of Poe's Critical Theory, p. 8) to support his perception that Eureka is based “in large part on his readings in a branch of Christian Philosophy … the field of Natural Theology and Apologetics.”

3. In addition to Dayan and Thompson, representative critics relating Eureka to Poe's tales include Evan Carton in The Rhetoric of American Romance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); E. H. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957); David Halliburton, Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973); John F. Lynen, “The Death of the Present: Edgar Allan Poe,” The Design of the Present: Essays on Time and Form in American Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969): 205-271; and Thomas J. Rountree, “Poe's Universe: The House of Usher and the Narrator,” Tulane Studies in English 20 (1972): 123-134.

4. Dayan argues that as Eureka “progresses,” the narrator's use of the dash “increasingly materializes the indefinite effect” (61), that is, crossing “repetition over repetition, the dash erases distinction while appearing to be definite” (75). Although Dayan argues that the dash is used by Poe to enhance his “sermon against the tendency to seek groundless principles of unity” (13), I think it more likely that he uses it both to symbolize intuitive ruptures in his narrator's consciousness and, perhaps, as a deliberate substitute for mathematical symbolism. In Marginalia 197, Poe himself refers to the dash as “an emendation” which makes “meaning more distinct” (325); that is, he grants the dash a symbolic force.

5. In their book-length studies of Poe, for example, both Joan Dayan and David Halliburton suggest that during Poe's lecture, his audience had, as Halliburton observes, “no difficulty in following the argument” detailed in Eureka, or “The Universe” (407).

6. Hilgard also demonstrates how these two approaches were crucial to the development of psychology in nineteenth-century American culture, as was “quantification,” or the production of “mathematical conjectures to explain psychological facts” (12). The narrator's breathless determination to replace mathematics (or quantification) in Eureka with intuition (and with dashes) may suggest Poe's awareness of currents in contemporary psychological thought and experimentation, particularly since, as Hilgard notes, such ideas were sometimes modified and published in popular nineteenth-century American journals.

7. For a summary of contemporary cosmogonic theories, see Jayant Narlikar's The Structure of the Universe (105-139). Unlike Poe's narrator, modern cosmologists like Narlikar include mathematics and exclude god—though their speculations may be equally “intuitive.” Narlikar's text does not detail recent, postmodern cosmogonic notions based on Chaos Theory, which imagines the universe to be more “coherent” than was previously imagined. Neither does Narlikar discuss “Gödel's proof,” which demonstrates that any complex symbolic system, such as mathematics, generates statements which may be meaningful, but are ultimately unprovable and which, therefore, offer scientific and mathematical “proof” that a structure as complex as the cosmos can never be deciphered. However, perhaps to their credit, none of Poe's critics have yet attempted to apply these latter cosmogonic perceptions to Eureka.

8. There is, however, no generally accepted view of the grotesque. As Harpham further summarizes, there have been notable conflicting critical perceptions regarding the significance or meaning of the grotesque, with two major critics, Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin, managing “to contradict each other utterly on the most basic premises” of this literary concept (xvii).

9. The author wishes to acknowledge support of this research by an Indiana University Summer Research Grant.

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