[In the following essay, Sorescu inspects motifs common to Eminescu and Edgar Allan Poe.]

Let us start a literary discussion by assuming the condition of any discussion about literature: that of perpetrating an impiety. Let us put side by side two summaries, the reduced, skeletonized, rationalized models of two masterpieces, Mihail Eminescu's poem “Melancholy” and Edgar Allan Poe's tale “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Not without recalling the challenge issued—with that mixture of frankness, lucidity, insolence and desire to startle that characterize his theoretical writings—by Poe himself in “The Philosophy of Composition”: “of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” Death—was the obvious reply “And when”, I said, “is this most melancholy of topics most poetical”? From what I have already explained at some length, the answer, here also, is obvious—“When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world—and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best smiled for such topic are those of a bereaved lover”¹. We do not know whether it is more poetic, but another, closely related subject is certainly more terrifying: one's own death, glimpsed as strange spectacle by a man recording his agony, actor and spectator alike. Eminescu and Poe have both approached the theme, with a similarity of motifs and of symbolic senses that prompts us to place the Romanian poet in a different spiritual family than the one currently accepted hitherto. It should be stated, from the very start, that this is not a matter of influences in the sense of expressions, themes or collections transferred from one work to the other, but one of analogies involving not only the upper layers of consciousness. Eminescu knew Poe's work, at least the tales translated by Baudelaire—possibly also the poems—for he translated “Morella” with Veronica Micle (or merely brushed up her translation). In fact, Poe was appreciated in the Junimea circle, where Maiorescu enjoyed reading from his work, while Caragiale took a close look at his devices in building the fantastic. But such circumstances could have been absent without altering the profound coincidences between the two poets' literary thinking.

An admirable analysis of the state of dissatisfaction, anxiety, weariness and lack of confidence in the virtues of reason and passion in world and Romanian literature has been undertaken by Zoe Dumitrescu-Buşulenga in the “Melancholy Motif.”² Dürer and Shakespeare, Milton and Keats, Gérard de Nerval, Eminescu and Blaga are examined in the subtle nuances assumed by the expression of the despondency, apathy, indecision and despair of man when confronted with the spectacle of the world.

Melancholy, cultivated as the other side of the medal, especially in the periods that exalted individuality and confirmed Titanism, in the Renaissance in the Romantic age notably, can be defined only with difficulty. And Eminescu's particularly. The poet gave this title to a poem that he lyrically assumed, after he ascribed it, in his dramatic attempt Mira, to Prince Stefăniţă, dissatisfied with all and self-disdaining, torn between an impulse to murder and deepest apathy, cultivating only a chimerical love for a strange, hard-hearted being—the daughter of old Arbore—who gives her name to the play without ever being seen other than through the eyes of those fascinated by her. The lyric monologue takes shape, in the characteristic Eminescu manner (constantly detected in the structure of the Letters), as a landscape description, a scene selected by a beholding eye in relation to a certain psychic state, followed by direct expression of the feeling that determined the selection and description. The eye looking downwards, from the astral worlds to the terrestrial, records, under the deathly light of the pale moon, the ruins of a wind-beaten church, deserted by the images of faith and by faith itself. (Faith in the sense of trust in an ideal of perfection and purity, which is nothing but the projection of inward security into the power to create spirit-moved worlds.) There follows an identification of the lyric self with the church ruins, accompanied by the anguish of self-estrangement, of the painful awareness of a dual personality, culminating in the domination of an autoscopic vision. Beginning and ending under the sign of overruling Death (“the Queen of Night, now dead;” “I seem to be long dead”), the poem includes some essential motifs of Eminescu's poetic imagination: the moon—a dead queen, the church that degradation of the marks of faith has turned into a mere sign of the inevitable disappearance of forms, the introduction into this deserted place of small noises by indifferent creatures (The priest, a small grasshopper, spins a dim, slender thought, / The canter is a beetle under the age-old wall”³; the split personality, identified with the ruinous landscape on the side shown to the beholder and with an indifferent, ironical demon of the beholding side.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” is a narrative told in the first person by a friend of Roderick Usher, whom this has called to keep him company in the difficult moments of his twin sister's agony and death. The narrator approaches the House of Usher “as the shades of the evening drew on”: “I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded by spirit (…). I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the black walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare with no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into everyday life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.”⁴ (In Eminescu: “And through the broken windows I hear the wind awhistling;” “I vainly my world seek in my exhausted brain, / A cricket hoarsely chirps a sad, autumnal song / And vainly now I press my hand on my desolate heart.”). To the narrator, as to anybody else, the man inhabiting the house blends with it to the degree of actually becoming one. With a cadaverous complexion, Roderick Usher takes his guest into the depth of his terror—the illness and agony of his sister, the Lady Madeline: “a settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although transient affection of a partially cataleptical character.” (Mira, as seen by Ştefăniţă: “Her gaze is vacant like a mad girl's. / I often sought to tell her of my love / But her harsh eye, also her godless smile / My heart would always crush …”). When the death of his sister seems a reality, Roderick places her corpse in a vault within a main wall of the building. An obscure guilt keeps him in a constant state of tension and watchfulness until, one evening, the two men's reading together is broken by the spectral appearance of the Lady Madeline who, out of the vault where she had been buried alive, “with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim of the terrors he had anticipated. The narrator flees aghast from the accursed mansion, which he sees bursting and collapsing behind him, in the unreal radiance of the “full, setting, and blood-red noon.”

“Melancholy” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” confront us not with accidental descriptive coincidences but with a constellation of motifs essential to the two authors, having very similar symbolic values and being used for the same expressive purpose. In both texts the ego is identified with a ruined building, the ruins are placed in a deathly lunar light (while, pale in Eminescu, blood-red in Poe), the ego is split into an anxiously contemplative and a death-oriented side (Roderick-Madeline) and “Who's the one to tell the tale now by heart … I seem to be long dead.”

Psychoanalysis has recorded the role of the shelter in the configuration of the deep ego, the feminine semantics of the house, which is assimilated with the maternal womb: “Tell me what your imaginary house looks like, and I'll tell you who you are … The home is a double, a super-determination of the resident's personality.”⁵ To imagine two buildings in a strikingly similar condition may be regarded as the sign of an almost identical state of mind. It should be noted from the start that all the common symbolic elements used by Eminescu and Poe are placed under the sign of the double: the church or house—personality's double, the moon—an element prefiguring androgyny, the ego split into Animus and Anima, male and female, through distinct characters in Poe, through an autoscopic vision in Eminescu. And one split part is always under the sign of Death: the outward projection is a ruin, the Lady Madeline dies, “On my desolate heart I vainly my hand press / It beats, a death-watch beetle, in a coffin's soft wood.”

The symbolism of the moon and of the lunar deities has been decoded, by the frequency of apparitions, as being subject to the idea of androgyny: “the philosophy underlying every lunar theme is a rhythmical view of the world—a rhythm achieved by the succession of contraries, by an alternation of antithetic modalities: life and death, form and latency, being and non-being, wound and consolation (…). Still, the moon is not a mere model of mystic confusion but a dramatic scansion of time. The lunar hermaphrodite itself retains the distinct traits of its double sexuality.⁶ In Eminescu, the lunar androgyny is marked by changing the gender of the nouns designating the heavenly body: “the Queen of Night” and “You, sweet and adored king of our nights.” It may also happen that the alterations dictated by exterior elements, as the rhyme, depend on the deep structures. There is, however, in both the texts a specific mark: the moon absolutely represents Death alone, losing the ambiguity implicit in the possibility of renewal. The landscape dominated by the dead monarch transforms, in Eminescu, the world into a vast temple dedicated to extinction. With far less emphasis on the lunar motif but expanding to the degree of hallucination the symbolism of the house turned into a tomb, Poe's text suggests its meanings by reducing the cosmos to the shelter of the split being.

With Eminescu the moon correlates also with the other essential element of the poet's psychic structure, namely with rhythm. The grass hopper and the beetle with their small noises almost invariably fill the need of “musicalizing” the universe. In “Melancholy” their rhythm, usually gentle and monotonous, is amplified by apocalyptic signals coming from the decaying church: “The steeple is a-creaking, the pillars are a-beating.” That the grasshopper, the dead-watch beetle, or, elsewhere, the mice “with their patter” come most probably from the poet's everyday experience seems obvious, but their significance may indeed transcend that of mere daily occurrences, Eminescu having selected from reality mostly such elements as his cultural memory could enrich with mythical senses. In the Phaedrus, Plato tells the story of how grasshoppers were born: “A lover of music like yourself ought surely to have heard the story of the grasshoppers, who are said to have been human beings in an age before the Muses. And when the Muses came and song appeared they were ravished with delight; and singing always, never thought of eating and drinking, until at last in their forgetfulness they died. And now they live again in the grasshoppers; and this is the return which the Muses make to them—they neither hunger, nor thirst, but from the hour of their birth are always singing, and never eating or drinking; and when they die they do and inform the Muses in heaven who honours them on earth.”⁷ The grasshopper offers the poet not only a rhythm but also a double of himself, both natural and legendary.

In Poe's tale, the rhythm governing the outward projection of the ego is replaced by a pictorial symbolism, by a kind of emblematizing through a lyric and a legendary text: the picture painted by Roderick (representing a room without any outlet, a vault ghastly illumined from an invisible source), the poem about “The Haunted Palace” and the tale of the dragon's killing. As forms of exorcising terrors, of introducing order into chaos, all these elements play a role similar to that which, in Eminescu, is played by the rhythms of harmless creatures.

The motif of the double takes on multiple aspects in Eminescu, all being found in Poe as well: a shadow cast by the body upon the world, a primary physical form, dark and without consistency, a realm of night; a face reflected (in a clear water, in mirrors), which Eminescu particularly sees as a manifestation of feminine split personality, a projection of human narcissism; the twin motif—identical but antagonistic brothers, one angelic, the other demonic, Sarmis-Brighelu, the two William Willsons, Roderick-Madeline, a metamorphosis of the Narcis complex into the Cain-Abel complex; the motif of succession, of the appearance at different times, in different forms, of the same psychic entity, the motif of avatar and metempsychosis (“Poor Dionis,” “The Avatars of the Pharaoh Tlà,” and “Morella”—the tale of a mother who transfers her spirit into her daughter, which Eminescu selected for translation—all belong to the same family); the motif of a hermaphrodite split into a couple that seek to restore the primary unity through Eros; and lastly, in close association with the preceding, the motif of psychic splitting into two identical units, one watching the death of the other. Related to the motif of the couple rejoined through Eros, the motif of the deceased double turns into the motif of love for a dead being, the motif of Animus recognizing and searching for his lifeless Anima. The way in which these two last motifs are rejoined assumes, profound similarities in Eminescu's and Poe's texts. “The Ghosts” and “Lenore” are poetical constructions born of the same psychic complex split in search of unity, as are “Melancholy” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

Of primary interest to us is the presence of common motifs in Eminescu and Poe. The general meanings of the symbolic elements used by the two poets come from the ancestral fund of humanity, are “anthropological structures of the imaginary,” where the reader is supposed to be almost as competent as the writer in order to understand him, but we are most concerned with the fact that such motifs are interconnected in the works of both Eminescu and Poe into repetitive networks and that these constellations, these networks are very similar. In other words, we can regard them as “obsessive metaphors” tending to become a “personal myth,” the same personal myth in Eminescu and Poe, the myth of projecting a basically schizoid myth into a contemplative and a death-oriented phase, linked together by an unspeakable terror and an irresistible attraction.

The attempt to find out the personal myth common to “Melancholy” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” raises two points of method worth discussing. The first relates to the right, boldness and ability of comparative analysis to extend its scope beyond the usual recording of loans, transfers and influences, nay, beyond the structural homologies of works deriving from mentality homologies of the societies in which the authors live. The second, refers to the relation that can be established between the lyric and epic elements, since a text that we empirically regard as lyric can be identical in its deep structures with another that we usually consider epic.

The comparative method, when based on the semiotic of anthropological symbols, can undoubtedly bring the revelation of unknown or only vaguely suspected spiritual families, but it contains, like any other duality, the vice of its own virtues, the risk such a decoding of the symbols as the interpreter can give (“We may be on the right path. And yet this could be merely a series of coincidences. We must find a correspondence rule.” “Where can we find it?” “In our heads. Let us invent it, and then see whether it is the true one.” Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose). Starting in the analysis of literature from the concept of “archetypal pattern,” a concept that offers the advantage of associating the reader, “implicitly” or not, with the author, we come rapidly enough to “the anthropological structures of the imaginary,” which corrects the subjectivism of interpreting through records of meaning frequencies in dictionaries of symbols, some with comments, others organized according to the psychic distribution of the symbolic constellations (like Durand's work). Such dictionaries thus tend to become, from repertories of symbols, repertories of allegories. (“But then”, I made bold to comment, “you are very far from solving the problem.” “I am very close,” said Guglielmo, “but they are very sure of their mistakes.” “And you,” I asked with a childish imprudence, “You never make mistakes?” “Quite often,” he said. “But instead of conceiving one, I invent several, and so I am never enslaved to any one.” Ibidem).

In other words, having found the common genotext of different phenotexts (J. Kristeva), we have somehow reduced the lyric and the epic to the same denominator. And this common denominator is the symbolic, more exactly the existence of networks of common symbols in a state of mutual tensions, latent in a lyric text and objectivized in the epic. The archetypal pattern (Maud Baudkin), the personal myth (Charles Mauron) the symbolic senses of the imaginary (Jung, Bachelard, Durand,) the architext (Genette) and the genotext (Kristeva) prove that the critical languages, beyond their approximating capacity, lead us, along the path of logical reductionism, towards the idea that grouping the writers according to the deep elements of their works can yield results which are as suggestive as those yielded by grouping them by outward similarities (biographical coincidences such as the year of birth, thematic coincidences, etc.). But the fact that, whichever route we take, we do not go very far from one another, is no doubt encouraging. Other voices, the same gamut.

Notes

1. “The Philosophy of Composition,” in Poe's Poems and Essays, Everyman's Library, Dent-Dutton, London-New York 1964, p. 170

2. cf. Eminescu, Culture and Creation, Eminescu Publishing House, 1976, pp. 107-127

3. All quotations from Eminescu's poetry are from Poems, ed. D. Murăraşu, vols. I-III, Minerva Publishing House, 1970-72

4. The Fall of the House of Usher, in Tales of Mystery and Imagination, Collins Clear-Type Press, n.d., p. 119

5. Gilbert Durand, The Antropological Structures of the Imaginary, Univers Publishing House, 1977, pp. 301 ff

6. Ibidem, pp. 365, 365, 366.

7. The Works of Plato, The Jowelt Translation, The Modern Library, New York, 1956, p. 302