poe

Edgar Allan Poe's (Meta)physics: A Pre-History of the Post-HumanAuthor(s): Matthew A. TaylorSource: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 62, No. 2 (September 2007), pp. 193-221Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncl.2007.62.2.193 .

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Edgar Allan Poe’s(Meta)physics: A Pre-History of the Post-HumanMATTHEW A. TAYLOR

¬n 1852 Herbert Mayo, renowned pro-fessor of physiology and anatomy at

King’s College, London, published in Philadelphia his PopularSuperstitions, and the Truths Contained therein, with an Account ofMesmerism, which claimed to make all phenomena—from the“singular facts” of divining rods, clairvoyant trances, and vam-pires to the more common matters of batteries, magnets, anddreams—comprehensible through reference to a single, re-cently discovered energy allied to but distinct from electricity,magnetism, and heat.1 This “Od” or “Odic force,” as it wasnamed by its discoverer, the noted geologist and chemist Baronvon Reichenbach, supposedly animated the entire material andspiritual universe. Indeed, Mayo sought to convince his readersthat the force’s influence was ubiquitous, governing all thingsanimate and inanimate, seen and unseen; but most important toMayo was his more specific claim that individual persons, andconsequently humanity as a whole, were powerfully affected by

193

Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 62, No. 2, pp. 193–221. ISSN: 0891-9356, online ISSN: 1067-8352. © 2007 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please directall requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.1 See Mayo, Popular Superstitions, and the Truths Contained Therein, with an Account of

Mesmerism (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1852), p. 10.



the force. No less than the entirety of people’s physical and spir-itual lives, their strengths and weaknesses, successes and fail-ures, fates and character traits, were dependent upon the partic-ular amount and polarity of Od force around and within theirbodies. Even consciousness itself, because it was theorized to bepredicated upon electrical activity in the nervous system, wasfound to result from the Od force’s action upon the self.

Far from a cultural aberration, Mayo’s study was in factrepresentative of a significant current of nineteenth-centurythought. Mayo was writing in the context of numerous theoriespremised upon the existence of an omnipresent force or princi-ple, including philosophical systems (panpsychism, Naturphi-losophie, transcendentalism), speculative sciences (electrophysi-ology, Humboldtian cosmology), and cultural practices thatconflated the two (mesmerism, spiritualism). He was commit-ted, like many of his peers, to uncovering a rational, unified, andmaterial model of the physical and metaphysical universe—aswell as the place of the newly conceived “human” within it.2Of course, this idea that the whole of existence—whether “nat-ural,” “spiritual,” or “human”—is reducible to a single, appre-hensible law has a long history in Western thought apart fromorthodox Christian theology, ranging from the Newtonian ce-lestial mechanism of the Enlightenment to the animism andatomism of pre-Socratic Greece; though the particular beliefsand emphases of these systems vary dramatically, all hold that“Man,” even if granted ontological priority, is inexorably subjectto the same powers and laws that superintend the rest of the uni-verse. What the nineteenth century adds to this narrative is, onthe one hand, a Romantic discourse of the Individual’s essentialcontinuity with the “natural” world (and thus with the Spirit be-hind it), and, on the other hand, an increasingly professional-ized scientific method enlisted to analyze such claims. Conceiv-ably contradictory (and often actually so), these two positions

194 nineteenth-century liter ature

2 I cannot here adequately address the considerable critical work done on the de-velopment and reification of a natural-historical notion of the “human” over the courseof the mid eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries, but see especially Giorgio Agam-ben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,2004) for an argument that the development of the nineteenth-century “human sci-ences” hardened the reification of an ontologically distinct (and superior) “human.”



nevertheless intersect in the perception that “human” beings arefundamentally interlineated with their larger environments. Inthis context, we can see even such mundane matters as the mid-century “germ theory” debates and Theodor Schwann’s 1839postulation of cell membrane permeability as participating inthe same general conversation as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden(1854) or the Fox sisters’ 1848 spirit-rappings: all were evidencethat bodies (and thus selves) are radically open to their sur-roundings, whether physical or spiritual.3

Thus, though an ardent materialist, Mayo regarded sup-posedly “spiritual” matters such as mesmerism (extensively doc-umented in the popular and esoteric literature of the period) asestablished facts—but ones subtended by a rational, scientificlaw rather than an impenetrable supernatural source. In fact,Mayo thought that mesmerism was humanity’s purest distilla-tion of the Od force as of yet, and certainly the most illustrative,because it perfectly captured people’s dependence upon theworkings of “external” powers.4 That this was the case, that mes-merism’s spectacular effects—telepathy insensitivity to physicalstimuli, reading through fingertips, hearing with stomachs, andso on—were the result of putative “individuals” becoming radi-cally subject to an extrinsic determinant, was scripted for Mayoand others in the entranced patients’ ready acquiescence to themesmerists’ commands and in the mesmerists’ own sympatheticconnection with the mental and physical states of their patients.5Moreover, because for Mayo the Od force behind mesmerismwas not uniquely invested in its human participants but insteadpermeated all of existence, everyday places and objects wereimparted with a new and extraordinary significance: the univer-

edgar allan poe’s (meta)physics 195

3 I am by necessity generalizing—but, I would argue, no more so than is licensed bythe works to which I refer. See Thomas S. Hall, Ideas of Life and Matter: Studies in the His-tory of General Physiology, 600 B.C.–1900 A.D., 2 vols. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,1969).

4 Prior to Mayo’s nomination of the Od force, eighteenth- and nineteenth-centurytheories of the basis of mesmerism’s power varied from invisible ethers to electromag-netic fluids, and claims regarding its effects proved equally diverse; but all postulatedthat the underlying energy, whatever its form, was universal and infinite.

5 See Popular Superstitions, p. 169; see also p. 121. For a definitive overview of mes-merism’s European origins and history, see Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind inVictorian Britain (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998).



sality of the Od meant that persons and things were intercon-nected to such an extent that the force of things could eitherupset or restore the Od balance of persons, with baleful orbeneficial results, respectively.

For Mayo, then, mesmerism’s revelation of the continuitybetween ostensibly differentiated persons and their environ-ments was not merely incidental; it was the practice’s conditionof possibility. The disintegration of the boundaries dividing selfand other, synecdochic for the general convergence of self andworld, was requisite for mesmerism’s dramatic exhibitions ofcontrol over individual bodies. In this light, in mesmerism’s andthe Od force’s transfer of authority over the “human” from thetraditional Christian God to a universal physical law, humanitywas no longer a creation apart, an isolated point of significancedefined in relief against an essentially detached world; instead,the “species” was integrated within a unified, physical cosmos.And yet this integration did not result, for Mayo, in either thespecies’ disappearance or its irrelevance.6 Rather, concedingthat the Od’s operations were largely opaque and uncontrolledat present, Mayo had every confidence that humanity might oneday manipulate its energies for the improvement of the race. In-deed, Mayo intimated that mesmeric “healings” might be thefirst, tentative step toward a future utopia in which a harnessedOd force would be consciously directed toward the full realiza-tion of humanity’s now dormant potentialities.

Like Mayo, Edgar Allan Poe actively studied mesmerismin the 1830s and 1840s. In addition to writing three explic-itly mesmeric tales, Poe reviewed and published the work ofother writers on the subject, was acquainted with some of themesmerist luminaries of his day, and maintained a correspon-dence with various experts in the field.7 And, like Mayo, Poe re-garded mesmerism as a particularly vivid instantiation of a more


6 Mayo thus duplicates the paradoxical logic of taxonomic natural histories sinceLinnaeus: assuming humanity’s fundamental commonality with the rest of nature, onthe one hand, while still reserving a sense of the significance of human difference, onthe other. See Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: JohnsHopkins Univ. Press, 1996).

7 For summaries of Poe’s relation to mesmerism, see Sidney E. Lind, “Poe and Mes-merism,” PMLA, 62 (1947), 1,077–94; Doris V. Falk, “Poe and the Power of AnimalMagnetism,” PMLA, 84 (1969), 536 – 46; Adam Frank, “Valdemar’s Tongue, Poe’s



fundamental process wherein persons are subjected to the con-trol of material universal forces. Unlike Mayo, however, Poe rad-ically deviated from the utopian, utilitarian, or benign notionsof mesmerism at play in most contemporary discourses on thetopic, picturing instead the unsettling implications for humanontology consequent upon the idea that persons are less sover-eign entities than manipulatable effects of external powers.8Rather than optimistically assuming, as Mayo and others did,that identifying a universal force is equivalent to mastering itfor the betterment of humanity, Poe concluded that an all-encompassing cosmic energy inevitably troubles human-beingby suspending the autonomy and interiority of individual hu-mans; the disorientation of normal, corporeal functioning andthe literal loss of self-possession attending mesmeric practice il-lustrated for Poe the fact that people are little more than occa-sions for the demonstration of an impersonal power. For Poe,then, mesmerism reveals the self’s identity—its putative inde-pendence and integrity—to be disturbingly fragile, if not alto-gether illusory.

In thus suggesting that contact with things profounderthan selves is necessarily disintegrative of the individual subject,


Telegraphy,” ELH, 72 (2005), 635–62; and Bruce Mills, Poe, Fuller, and the MesmericArts: Transition States in the American Renaissance (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press,2006). For broader accounts of mesmerism in America, see Maria M. Tatar, Spellbound:Studies on Mesmerism and Literature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978); John J. Kucich, Ghostly Communion: Cross-Cultural Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century AmericanLiterature (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2004); Samuel Chase Coale, Mes-merism and Hawthorne: Mediums of American Romance (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of AlabamaPress, 1998); Robert C. Fuller, Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls (Philadelphia:Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1982); and Bret E. Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum Amer-ica (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 1997). For a useful collectionof Poe’s positive statements about mesmerism, see Dwight Thomas and David K. Jack-son, The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849 (Boston: G. K. Halland Co., 1987), pp. 523, 619.

8 Poe consistently rejects his age’s “belief in the ultimate perfectibility of society”(Fuller, Mesmerism, p. 21), deriding many of the movements associated with mesmericprinciples, including “such causes as temperance, women’s rights, abolitionism, com-munitarianism, phrenology, . . . as well as dietary, dress, marriage, and medical reform”(Carroll, Spiritualism, p. 4). Writing to James Russell Lowell on 2 July 1844, Poe suc-cinctly notes: “I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion willhave no appreciable effect upon humanity” (The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. JohnWard Ostrom, 2 vols. [New York: Gordian Press, 1966], I, 256).



Poe touches upon a paradox at the heart of many nineteenth-century metaphysical discourses: namely, the idea that cosmicforces undermine any meaningful sense of the discreteness orindividuality of selves but, simultaneously, are also available forvarious practices of the self around which the individual subjectcan cohere (relevant here would be mesmerism or MadameBlavatsky’s later theosophy, but also, perhaps less obviously,Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature [1836] or Walt Whitman’s Leavesof Grass [1855]). Poe’s rejection of this logic is significant be-cause of both its timing and its broader implications, inter-vening as it does early in the development of a larger, quintes-sentially American formulation: the self-affirming dialecticbetween an emergent humanist Individualism (and its con-comitant notion of the autonomous, sovereign individual) andthose supra-personal “forces” (whether political, economic, orreligious) understood to be simultaneously greater than indi-viduals and yet also primary sources of individual identity. Early-century discourses of citizenship in American democracy (suchas those by Alexis de Tocqueville), mid-century social and reli-gious utopianisms, or late-century articulations of individuals inindustrial capitalism (such as Andrew Carnegie’s) may be themost familiar examples, but the underlying logic was ubiqui-tous.9 Poe—famously anti-democratic, anti-nationalistic, anti-capitalistic—makes clear, however, that you cannot have it bothways, cannot transcend the self for the sake of the self, cannotunify the social, much less the universal, without eliminating(the individuality of) individuals.10

In Poe’s universe, then, a cosmic force exists, but not in theservice of human interests. Nonidealistic, asocial, and nonhu-man, this universal principle relegates humankind to, at best, anephemeral existence: contingent, never assured, constantly en-


9 For the oft-noted convergence of theories of liberal democracy and market capi-talism in the formation of a distinctively American form of individualism, see StevenLukes, Individualism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973); and Reconstructing Individualism: Au-tonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller, et al. (Stan-ford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1986).

10 For the best articulation of Poe’s antagonism toward myths of national or economicprogress, see J. Gerald Kennedy, “‘A Mania for Composition’: Poe’s Annus Mirabilis andthe Violence of Nation-building,” American Literary History, 17 (2005), 1–35.



dangered. Indeed, the first principle of Poe’s cosmology is thatthe universe actively erodes that which can only heuristicallybe called “human,” “individual,” or “self,” and does so in a man-ner that is neither notional nor deferred, but corporeal and im-mediate. The general permeability, and thus susceptibility, ofpersons to largely invisible, abstract forces posited in the theo-ries of Mayo and others becomes, in Poe’s redaction, a graphic,sensory process wherein people are disarticulated by the tangi-ble, cosmically invested objects of their putatively everydayworlds. Such objects, I argue, portend, embody, and enact Poe’sown version of the (meta)physics of his age, a perverse yet con-sistent calculus that unites everything in existence under a sin-gle, universal law that, by definition, eliminates all difference—including, of course, the human difference. In other words,what happens to characters’ bodies in Poe’s tales mirrors whathappens, more fundamentally, to their selves vis-à-vis the uni-verse. Whether on the grand, cosmological scale of Eureka(1848) or in the microcosms of his short fiction, Poe picturesthe simultaneous provocation and erasure of subjectivity attend-ing the encounter between “self” and “world,” “person” and“thing.” In this essay, I contend that the surprising consistencyof this cosmological process in Poe’s writing necessitates thatwe interpret his works through a lens focused not on the discretesubject, as has been done (psychoanalytically, deconstructively,sociologically), but instead on the a-human universe in whichthese “subjects”—momentarily— obtain. Such an interpre-tation offers not only a different way of reading Poe but alsoa different way of understanding the contravening relation ofhis thought (negative, nonproductive, nonethical) to theutopian positivity of both his age’s human(ist) cultural imagi-nary and our age’s resultant, reactionary discourse of the “post-human.”11


11 I am thinking particularly of those “post-human” discourses that position them-selves as corrections to what is perceived to be humanism’s dangerously myopic exalta-tion of the human subject, advancing in its stead a more capable, ethical, inclusive, and“open” subjectivity or collectivity (generally under the aegis of some form of “hybrid-ity”). See Elaine L. Graham, Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Oth-ers in Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2002); and N. KatherineHayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics



In “Mesmeric Revelation” (1844), for instance, Poe pre-sents through the visions of a dying mesmerized patient (Mr.Vankirk) a picture of the universe in which all phenomena, bothphysical and spiritual, consist of a common material substrate,an “ultimate, or unparticled matter, [that] not only permeatesall things but impels all things—and thus is all things within it-self.”12 Subsequently revealed to be, as in Spinoza’s philosophy,a manifestation of “spirit” or “God,” this invisible “unarticulatedmatter” is, Vankirk insists, still “as fully matter as before” (“Mes-meric Revelation,” p. 1,034), the physical medium throughwhich all constituents of the interconnected universe manifestthe universal impulse.13 Contra the affirmations of life and selfevident in contemporary mesmeric theory, however, Vankirkclaims that apprehension of this universal influence is achiev-able only in a mesmeric trance or death, because these statesallow for the supercession of our individual, “rudimental” bod-ies (“Mesmeric Revelation,” p. 1,038). In other words, the self’sdeath (or its mesmeric equivalent) is the necessary cost of tran-sitioning from a body capable of capturing only a small, con-tingent spectrum of the totality of being to a state of absoluteharmony and identification with the universe: “in the ultimate,unorganized life [i.e., death], the external world reaches thewhole body. . . . in unison with it . . . the whole body vibrates”


(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999). For a riposte to the paradoxical “will-to-will”of much writing on the post-human, see Daniel T. O’Hara, “Neither Gods nor Mon-sters: An Untimely Critique of the ‘Post/Human’ Imagination,” boundary 2, 30, no. 3(2003), 107–22. More locally, I am resisting the affirmative account of “post-humanmimesis” in Poe offered by James Berkley in “Post-Human Mimesis and the DebunkedMachine: Reading Environmental Appropriation in Poe’s ‘Maelzel’s Chess-Player’ and‘The Man That Was Used Up,’” Comparative Literature Studies, 41 (2004), 356 –76. Poe,I argue, does not imagine the loss of the human into its environment only to reconsti-tute an improved subjectivity available to the individual self.

12 Edgar Allan Poe, “Mesmeric Revelation,” in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed.Thomas Mabbott, et al., 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press,1969–78), III, 1,033; further references are to this edition and appear in the text.

13 For a brilliant argument that Poe deflates spirituality by materializing it, see JoanDayan, Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987).Yet where Dayan posits that Poe’s insistence on physicality constitutes a rejection of allspiritual unity and meaning, I would argue that it instead subverts the period’s religiousorthodoxies only in order to embrace a material cosmic process that is itself infusedwith the meaningfulness (though not the salvific potential) normally reserved for thespiritual.



(pp. 1,037–38); or, as Vankirk states earlier, “when I am en-tranced the senses of my rudimental life are in abeyance, andI perceive external things directly, without organs” (p. 1,037;emphasis added).14 As out-of-body, self-abeyant events, bothmesmerism and death offer literally “direct” experiences of“uni[ty]” with the cosmos. Vankirk, however, just before he dies,makes clear that the difference between normal, “rudimental”senses and the sensations of the “ultimate life” is one of degreerather than kind; both states bodily register the universe’s “vi-brations,” even if it is only in the state of “ultimate life” that onerecognizes what the sensations portend: the conjunction of sen-sor and sensed in the unity of the “unparticled matter.” Whetherone is alive or dead, awake or entranced, sensations mark theimmediacy of congress and the reciprocity of identity betweensensible universe and sensing subject by blurring the line thatseparates the two; sensations, that is, mark the body’s destabiliz-ing encounter with its uncannily identical beyond.15 “MesmericRevelation” underscores this point by making subject and objectindistinguishable in the same moment that self and not-self arecollapsed into a common unity, in the same space where “exter-nal things [are perceived] directly.”

Like Poe’s mesmeric tales, Eureka combines empiricist in-quiry and transcendent insight, offering a material physics ofthe “spiritual” relation between self and universe by showingthe constitutive imbrication of the two, the interdependence-cum-convergence of subject and object.16 In short, Eureka is


14 Although the implications of the parallel are beyond the scope of this essay, thereis an uncanny resemblance between Vankirk’s vision of the “ultimate life” and GillesDeleuze and Félix Guattari’s description of “the body without organs.”

15 For a different account of the significance of sensations in Poe’s work, see DavidLeverenz, “Spanking the Master: Mind-Body Crossings in Poe’s Sensationalism,” in A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy (New York: Oxford Univ.Press, 2001), pp. 95–127.

16 Eureka’s mixture of scientific factuality and spiritual inspiration is made explicit inthe balance between the preface (“What I here propound is true:—therefore it cannotdie”) and the dedication (“to those who feel rather than to those who think—to thedreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities”) (Edgar Allan Poe,preface to Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe, in Edgar Allan Poe: Poetryand Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn [New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984],p. 1,259; further references are to this edition and appear in the text). Despite the po-etic form, Poe never suggests that the science of Eureka is inaccurate. Many critics of the



“Mesmeric Revelation” writ large and as a scientific tract—theexpansion of mesmeric principles to their natural, universallimits.17 An ontology couched within a cosmology, Eureka as-serts that the universe began with God’s self-differentiation intoa diffuse nervous system (i.e., the multiplicity of all phenome-nal things, including the human) and will end in an inevitablere-collapse into restored unity, a process already evident now in gravity. As in mesmerism, then, Eureka presents externalinfluence as the necessary corollary to the assumption of ubiq-uitous (meta)physical interconnection: “Every atom . . . attractsevery other atom, both of its own and of every other body” (Eureka,p. 1,284).18 Because of this spiritualized gravity (with which


tale, however, claim that Eureka is either a serious attempt at scientific knowledge withrhetorical flourishes to mask its logical deficiencies (see Peter Swirski, Between Literatureand Science: Poe, Lem, and Explorations in Aesthetics, Cognitive Science, and Literary Knowl-edge [Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 2000]) or an artwork moreinterested in aesthetic pleasure than scientific truth (see Josef Jar̀ab, “Edgar Allan Poe’sLiterary Strivings: How to Sell Beauty When Truth is a Bore,” in POEtic Effect and Cul-tural Discourses, ed. Hermann Josef Schnackertz [Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter,2003], pp. 51–60). More convincing are the analyses (such as Joseph N. Riddel, Pur-loined Letters: Originality and Repetition in American Literature, ed. Mark Bauerlein [BatonRouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1995]; and John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics:The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance [New Haven: YaleUniv. Press, 1980]) that abandon such binaries in favor of acknowledging Poe’s syn-thetic approach, one capacious enough to celebrate the Schellingian “intuitive leaps” ofthe soul by which the mere perception of “facts” are suddenly comprehended as “Law”(Poe, Eureka, pp. 1,264, 1,265). Thus, Eureka does not undermine its own authority bycovertly presenting intuitions as facts, as Michael J. S. Williams has claimed (see A Worldof Words: Language and Displacement in the Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe [Durham, N.C.: DukeUniv. Press, 1988]); instead, it openly stakes its authority on the assumption that intu-itions are equal if not superior to facts.

17 Poe viewed Eureka as seriously as he did the mesmeric tales. He famously wrote tohis mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, on 7 July 1849, shortly before his death: “I have nodesire to live since I have done ‘Eureka.’ I could accomplish nothing more” (Letters, II,452). To this we can add Poe’s statements in a 29 February 1848 letter to George W.Eveleth: “you will recognize the novelty & moment of my views. What I have propoundedwill (in good time) revolutionize the world of Physical & Metaphysical Science. I saythis calmly—but I say it” (Letters, II, 362). I must disagree, therefore, with Dayan’s judg-ment that to read Eureka as actually suggesting a basis of unity rather than as a parodicsavaging of the same is to become victim to our own “all-too-human desire for unity,permanence, or substance” (Dayan, Fables of Mind, p. 8). Similarly, I cannot concur withHarold Beaver’s classification of Eureka as a “hoax” (see Beaver, introduction to The Sci-ence Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Beaver [London: Penguin, 1976], p. xvi).

18 For the scientific sources upon which Poe here draws, see Margaret Alterton’s stillrelevant Origins of Poe’s Critical Theory (Iowa City: University of Iowa, 1925).



Isaac Newton himself would have been sympathetic), all thingsof the universe are related not only in their common origin butalso immediately in the present, across time and space, in theinfinite interactions taking place between every atom in theuniverse as they fall back toward unity—so much so that eventhe “displace[ment] . . . [of a] microscopial speck of dust . . .shakes the Moon in her path . . . [and] alters forever the des-tiny of the multitudinous myriads of stars” (Eureka, p. 1,286).Consequently, no-thing is independent or autonomous, no-thing fixed or stable.

And this includes us. To illustrate the point—that gravitynecessitates the eventual convergence of universe and individ-ual—Poe rhetorically conflates celestial bodies and humanones, claiming that “stellar bodies” and “bodies on the Earth”mutually attract one another (Eureka, p. 1,328). Grammaticallycollapsing selves and worlds into a single term (“bodies”) issignificant, then, because it mirrors the parallel, physical col-lapse occurring in the material universe. What the conflationdemonstrates most generally is that we are not exempt from thethings happening around us. Indeed, Eureka argues, in beingopen to being affected by bodies not our own, “we” inevitably be-come something other than what we supposed ourselves to be,something less self-sovereign because more externally deter-mined. Contact with the larger universe, in other words, es-tranges our bodies from our selves. And though gravity is themost obvious indication of this irrevocable, logical telos (the re-turn to unity through the revocation of individuality), it is notthe only means of apprehending this fate; in fact, innate withinour consciousness is a latent knowledge of our future destiny.Even more startling, we are not alone in this knowledge; in Poe’spanpsychic universe, all “creatures” are conscious of their(d)evolution:

All . . . creatures—all—those whom you term animate, as well asthose to which you deny life for no better reason than that youdo not behold it in operation—all . . . are . . . conscious Intelli-gences; conscious, first, of a proper identity; conscious, secondlyand by faint indeterminate glimpses, of an identity with the Divine Being. . . . Of the two classes of consciousness, . . . the for-mer will grow weaker, the latter stronger, . . . before these myri-




ads of individual Intelligences become blended . . . into One. . . .individual identity will be gradually merged in the general con-sciousness . . . Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feelhimself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epochwhen he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah. In themeantime bear in mind that all is Life—Life—Life within Life—the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine. (Eu-reka, pp. 1,358–59)

As Eureka’s conclusion, this passage encapsulates the es-say’s dominant themes: that the coherent identities of “individ-ual” things (especially “Man”) ultimately will be lost in the finalreconstitution of God; that this is a transitional process whoseeffects can be felt in the present; that we are not the only thingsto feel it. Together, these ideas capture the exceeding strange-ness of Eureka’s universe. On the one hand, it makes “us” con-tinuous with the godhead; but, on the other hand, it does soonly by reducing “us” to a mortal knowledge of our commonthingness. In revealing that “inanimate” and “animate” thingsalike are all of a shared, divine substance, Eureka necessarilyeliminates our ontological distinction and, consequently, “our”existence. In opposition, therefore, to the this-worldly opti-mism and anthropocentricism of its contemporaries, Eurekaechoes Vankirk in making “our” death—the death of the indi-vidual, the death of the human—a precondition of full tran-scendence. Poe notes: “in order to comprehend what [God] is,we should have to be God ourselves” (Eureka, p. 1,276)—and,for Poe, we can only become God when “we” are no more;something survives our fatal convergence “into One,” but it isnot “us.” In Poe’s universe, identity can only be born in the mo-ment that difference is buried, when gravity yields the grave.19


19 See Irwin, American Hieroglyphics; Jonathan Auerbach, The Romance of Failure: First-Person Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989); Ken-neth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (New York: Harper-Collins, 1991); Dennis Pahl, Architects of the Abyss: The Indeterminate Fictions of Poe,Hawthorne, and Melville (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1989); and Evan Carton, TheRhetoric of American Romance: Dialectic and Identity in Emerson, Dickinson, Poe, and Hawthorne(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985). These critics all have discussed how Eu-reka makes death a precondition for knowledge, but they do so in order then to offer ei-ther deconstructionist or psychoanalytic arguments that diverge from the point thatI believe Poe is making here about the material basis of such absolute identification.



The supposedly “individual” self, actually coextensive withthe universe, is thus both more (God) and less (an atom) thanitself, but always already different from itself. What Eureka ef-fects, then, is a transition from digital/synchronic conceptionsof self and other to an analogic/diachronic understanding thatcancels such absolute divisions by illustrating their inevitableflux between individuation and identity. It bears repeating, how-ever, that despite the potentially auspicious resonances of thisassertion, Poe makes clear that “we” cannot have a positive rela-tion to such a circumstance: “we” cannot put it to use, be ele-vated by it, pray to it, or even taken solace from it; “we” cannoteven survive it. “We” can only be (dis)integrated by it. Thus,though the general tone of Eureka is one of ecstatic insight, thereis yet a pervasive sense of the sinister fate awaiting “us.” Poewrites of “spiritual shadows,” “phantoms of processes completedlong in the Past,” and “Memories that haunt us during our Youth,”all of which “sometimes pursue us even into our Manhood:—assum[ing] less and less indefinite shapes:—now and thenspeak[ing] to us with low voices” (Eureka, pp. 1,356, 1,321,1,357). Indeed, Poe claims, “We walk about . . . encompassed bydim but ever present Memories of a Destiny more vast—very dis-tant in the by-gone time, and infinitely awful” (p. 1,356). These“memories,” Poe suggests, are of our past unity, our existenceprior to our differentiation from One, and are therefore alsonecessarily omens of our future “destiny.” The temporality in-herent to a memory that is simultaneously a prophesy speaks tothe fact that our ostensibly “individual” lives are bracketed by anondifferentiated mode of being. It also illustrates that “we” arenot truly independent even in this life; these “shadows” and“memories” “speak to,” “pursue,” and “haunt” “us” in the pre-sent, reminding/foretelling “us” of our irrevocable/inevitablepast/future loss of self. In other words, “we” never are (alone).

Such a scenario should sound familiar: it is one that Poe’stales obsessively rehearse. Time and again, Poe’s characters are“haunted” by the knowledge of something “more vast”—and“infinitely awful”; they are overwhelmed by the sense that thereis something more than that which they can immediately appre-hend, something that is a matter of life and death. In Poe’s tales,though, the ephemeral “whispers” of Eureka assume material




bodies: “shadows” take flesh; “phantoms” become palpable real-ities; incorporeal thoughts “assume less and less indefiniteshapes.” Yet these now-tangible places and things do the samework as Eureka’s whispered memories: they “speak to us with lowvoices” about our future, they precipitate an encounter with thatwhich is beyond “us.” As localized instantiations of the fatal ef-fect of other “bodies” on our own, the myriad forms in Poe’s talesthus concretize and particularize the general cosmological nar-rative outlined in Eureka: individual entities subjected to theinfluence of their larger environments, until a final collapse can-cels their differentiation. Therefore, though written at the endof Poe’s life, well after his most prolific period of producingshort fiction, Eureka can be read as retroactively theorizing inbroad philosophical strokes the consistent (meta)physical lawsembodied in much of his earlier writings.20 From cats to cometsto teeth, normally innocuous things, now synecdochically in-vested with cosmic import, bring selves into submission to theworld, thus producing a state wherein the subject is itself re-duced to a thing.

Martin Heidegger’s analysis in Being and Time (1953) ofthe relation between Dasein and objects can help to clarify thesignificance of what Poe is doing in these instances. Exploringthe paradox that everyday things (such as hammers or clocks)are normally invisible as discrete items because of the familiar-ity and banality of their use by Dasein (“‘things’ never showthemselves initially by themselves”), Heidegger argues that suchthings become “conspicuous” only when they resist the norma-tive associations attached to them or when, more directly, theydefy being used.21 Whether it is because they are damaged, mis-placed, or merely “in the way,” things demand confrontationonly when they are obstinately “unhandy,” when their “handi-ness” or purposiveness for Dasein is interrupted (Being and


20 For prior, differently valenced readings of Eureka’s relation to the tales, see Dayan,Fables of Mind; Carton, Rhetoric of American Romance; and Louis A. Renza, Edgar Allan Poe,Wallace Stevens, and the Poetics of American Privacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ.Press, 2002).

21 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of “Sein und Zeit,” trans. Joan Stam-baugh (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1996), pp. 64, 68.



Time, p. 69). What is important about this interruption is that it briefly suspends Dasein’s normal “being-in-the-world” byshort-circuiting Dasein’s ability to “tak[e] care of things” (Beingand Time, p. 71), which, for Heidegger, has deep implications.Because of the irrevocable interconnection between Daseinand environment (indeed their mutual definition), if Dasein’sbeing-in-the-world were disrupted in more than a momentaryway by the insubordination of things (something that Heideg-ger does not explore), then Dasein’s “fundamental structure,”or “basic ontological constitution” (Being and Time, pp. 37, 181),would by definition be disrupted, thus precluding it from re-maining Dasein.

Although it may seem odd to reference Heidegger whendiscussing Poe, both writers examine how aberrations from thenormal make visible— or uncover—that which was previouslyunseen. And both are concerned with the ontological stakes ofeveryday “pragmata” (Being and Time, p. 64) and the mutual con-stitution of self and world in a shared unity of Being that they re-veal. Despite this, however, the authors arrive at illustratively di-vergent conclusions. Though they agree that neither self norworld exist prior to their encounter, Poe refuses to grant priorityto humanity/Dasein in the intersection, as Heidegger does.22

Indeed, Poe’s tales invert Heidegger’s teleology of the relationbetween the ontological being of Dasein and the ontic being ofobjects: Poe makes objects significant because of their resistanceto and canceling (rather than furtherance or explanation) of hu-man being. Moreover, for Poe this resistance by things raises theunsettling possibility that human intelligence is not the onlyconsciousness-of-being extant within the universe, potentiallynot even the highest (a conceptual impossibility for early Hei-degger). Poe presents things as diverse as landscapes, animals,and atoms as sentient and willfully antagonistic, consciouslythinking of, manipulating, and destroying “us.”


22 The reductive conflation of the terms “humanity” and/or “self” with Dasein is notstrictly fair to Heidegger’s usage. Insofar as Heidegger does present Dasein as the par-ticular kind of being exclusive to humankind, however, this approximation will servefor the purposes of illustration required here.



Thus, rather than asserting their presence only when “un-handy” (for Heidegger being “unusable” merely reinscribes thefact that things exist for persons), Poe’s things attain promi-nence by forcefully propelling themselves from the indiscern-ability of the material background to the hypervisibility ofpeople’s lives, before dragging them back to the abyss of indis-tinction (Being and Time, p. 69). Such dramatic interventionsforce people to recognize that things are “objectively present”(p. 69), actively disabling their mastery of and being in theworld. Where Heidegger wants to eschew “theoretically” consid-ering things independently of their utility or “handiness” to Da-sein as “material for living” (Being and Time, pp. 68, 64), Poewants to demystify the illusions of independence and anthro-pocentrism by revealing there to be only one material of life,one in which humanity and individual selves are lost in, orfolded into, their others.23 Indeed, it is the moment of this en-tropic relapse into the common indistinction of thingness (forboth “objects” and “subjects”) that makes “individual” formsperceptible at all—thus Vankirk is most aware of his body whenhe senses it being absorbed into the universe. And Poe advancesthis fusion-via-annihilation as the standard of subject-object re-lations in the world. Individual, discrete things stand-in for, arethe visible reminders/remainders of, materiality as such, thecommon denominator that reveals a mutual origin and foretellsa shared, future collapse with the perceiving subject. Like themore transparent universal processes of Eureka or the mesmerictales, the things of Poe’s other writings, protean embodiments ofcosmic forces, attack the integrity of characters’ coherent, au-tonomous identities, rending them apart (rendering them apart) and revealing them to be of the same constitution as, sub-ject to the same forces as, continuous with rather than discretefrom, unified Being. Such things, in other words, do violence to“us.” Put another way, Poe’s tales ask: what happens when Hei-


23 Arrogating ontological privilege, or at least distinction, to the human is, ofcourse, not exclusive to Heidegger. It should also be noted that although Poe doestrouble the assumption of humanity’s exalted, differential status, he is not entirely ex-empt from anthropocentrism; he is still concerned with the human, even if only in itsdisappearance.



degger’s hammer hammers “us”? Or when a raven not onlyspeaks, but speaks to “us” in the negative?24

These are the kinds of questions asked recently in socio-logical rather than ontological terms by Bill Brown, who, likeHeidegger, notes that behind “objects” with socially inscribedmeanings, interpretive codes, and significations are opaque“things,” often invisible until “they stop working for us.”25 Whileacknowledging the evasiveness of its subject—“the Thing be-comes the most compelling name for that enigma that can onlybe encircled and which the object (by its presence) necessarilynegates” (“Thing Theory,” p. 5)—Brown’s “thing theory” yetsuggests that the (un)settling of the subject’s knowledge of theobject, indeed the (de)stabilization of the very notions “human-ity,” “self,” “subject,” and “object,” is not unidirectional, notsolely the province of the human; things, too, play a role in thesetting-up/upsetting of our orders. And this spectral yet conse-quential quality of Brown’s things nicely accords with Poe’s tales,which present the outcomes of “objects asserting themselves asthings,” breaking away from their normative associations anduses in order to exist in spaces of estrangement and invertedpower relations. Unlike other nineteenth-century discourses(such as mesmerism and spiritualism) that invested physicalthings (e.g., therapeutic crystals) with metaphysical weight onlyto enlist them in the interests of human subjects, Poe articulatesa process wherein objects become things working toward thesubject’s end rather than ends. Thus, whereas Eureka presents asweeping, post-human exhibition of the self’s unification withthe universe, the tales show the all-too-human, often terrifyingprocess of the self becoming subject to the things around it—becoming, as it were, a thing it-self.


24 For Heidegger’s exposition of how hammers further the being of Dasein, see Be-ing and Time, pp. 64–65.

25 Brown argues that we can only “begin to confront the thingness of objects whenthey stop working for us . . . when their flow within the circuits of production and dis-tribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. Thestory of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation tothe human subject” (Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry, 28 [2001], 4). Al-though Brown does not here explicitly reference Heidegger, he does acknowledge therelation in other writings.



Consider, for instance, “Ligeia” (1838). Given its epi-graph—which reads in part, “God is but a great will pervadingall things. . . . Man doth not yield himself to . . . death . . . saveonly through the weakness of his feeble will”26—and given thestandard interpretation of the story as emblematic of an in-domitable will enabling even the survival of death, it may seemcounterintuitive to include the tale in a discussion on the deathof individuals.27 The difficulty is only superficial, however. Thetale’s epigraph, for instance, anticipates almost verbatim Eu-reka’s pantheistic assertion of God “pervading all things,” includ-ing the “will” of “Man.” And, as we have seen, such a universal in-terconnection works to cancel the survival of individual selves.Indeed, from the tale’s first page, the narrator’s existence as anindependent entity is endangered, as Ligeia is characterized as“enthralling” and “pass[ing] . . . into [the narrator’s] spirit”(“Ligeia,” pp. 310, 314); the narrator even admits, “I wassufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy to resign myself . . .to her guidance” (p. 316). Reproducing the structure of themesmeric séance, the narrator literally loses himself in Ligeia’seyes, his “I” into her eye.28

In order to see how this represents a loss of selves ratherthan their consummation, we can follow the narrator’s exampleand pause for a moment on (or within) Ligeia’s eyes. To himthey resemble the “twin stars of Leda” and almost “recall tomemory something long forgotten” (“Ligeia,” p. 313). But he isnot “able, in the end, to remember” what this “something” is,leading him to repeatedly ask “what was it?” regarding that“which lay far within the pupils of [his] beloved” (pp. 314, 313).


26 Edgar Allan Poe, “Ligeia,” in Collected Works, II, 310; further references are to thisedition and appear in the text.

27 See, for instance, Arthur Hobson Quinn’s classic Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biogra-phy (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1941), pp. 269–70; and J. Gerald Kennedy,“Poe, ‘Ligeia,’ and the Problem of Dying Women,” in New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales, ed.Kenneth Silverman (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 113–29.

28 Harold Bloom reads Poe’s work in general, and “Ligeia” in particular, as beingcentered on psychological “absorption” and pathological fantasies of “incorporation”(see Bloom, introduction to The Tales of Poe, ed. Bloom [New York: Chelsea House,1987], p. 8). I concur with Bloom’s attention to absorption but define it in materialrather than psychological terms.



Groping for an answer, the narrator compares looking intoLigeia’s eyes with viewing “the commonest objects of the uni-verse”: a “vine,” “a moth,” “a stream,” “a meteor,” “the glancesof unusually aged people,” “books,” and “stringed instruments”(p. 314). What unifies these things? Some form of arcane vitalenergy? Eternal process? In either case they would mirrorLigeia’s indefatigable “will” to survive death. But if this is true,then their relation inexorably depersonalizes Ligeia insofar asher defining characteristic is found to be nothing less than thecommon nature of the universe itself. Perhaps, then, the associ-ation of these disparate things and Ligeia registers a trace oftheir shared material and spiritual origin and their resultant in-terconnected existence in the present; perhaps they are thephysical clues to the aforementioned “something long forgot-ten,” or to Eureka’s “spiritual shadows” and “Memories of a Destinymore vast.” Perhaps these things, in other words, are the foren-sic evidence of what Eureka describes as God’s past self-dispersaland eventual reconstitution, reminders of our origin and fate.Regardless of the answer, the list illustrates that seemingly “indi-vidual” selves actually are equivalent to assemblages of similarlycommon things, items in a catalog of like objects.

Ligeia’s eyes, only the most prominent feature of a bodythat the narrator comprehensively anatomizes, thus testify nei-ther to personal uniqueness nor to a peculiarly human quality,but to their shared essence, even identity, with the universe;even the spherical form of her eyes is patterned tellingly on non-human spheres of a larger scale: stars and cosmos. These com-parisons, then, suggest “a circle of analogies” (“Ligeia,” p. 314;emphasis added)—a figural relation—because they refer to agenealogical resemblance: her “large and luminous orbs” (a re-current description) are rhetorically and materially related tothe heavenly orbs above her. Again, what this connection revealsis not what makes Ligeia exceptional but what makes her “com-mon” (equivalent to “the commonest objects of the universe”);or, if she is exceptional, then it is by the degree to which hercommonality is evident. Indeed, the tale as a whole denies indi-viduality to its characters by folding discrete persons into theirputative “others”: the narrator into Ligeia, Ligeia into the indis-tinction of the universe of kindred things.




Ligeia, uncannily attuned to this process, pens a macabrepoem about it from her deathbed. Describing the predestinedfate of humans in the language of a staged “tragedy” entitled“Man,” her verses depict a spectral orchestra playing “the musicof the spheres”; characterize humanity as “Mimes” and “pup-pets” controlled by “vast formless things,” “chas[ing]” but never“seiz[ing]” the “Phantom” they seek; and conceive of life as “acircle that ever returneth in / To the self-same spot,” ostensiblythe self’s return to indistinction via the “Conqueror Worm”(“Ligeia,” pp. 318–19). With “the soul of the plot” being “Mad-ness,” “Horror,” and “Sin” (p. 319), the poem calculates the “hu-man” cost of Eureka’s reversion of selves back to “the self-samespot,” the space of their origin. What Eureka characterizes as aharmonious fading of self into universe (even if the self neverbenefits from the union), “Ligeia” unabashedly presents as apainful farce on the blind impotence and impermanence of hu-manity. The physical motion is the same, the emotion differs.29

In both works, “we” are out of control of “ourselves.”Even Ligeia’s “return” from death, which apparently over-

throws the Conqueror Worm’s reign, is not an assertion of thedurability of individuality but an exemplification of the forcesobliterating it. Amid the “hideous and uneasy animation” of a tapestry ambiguously moved by either spirit or wind, and “thephantasmagoric influences of the chamber itself” (“Ligeia,”pp. 322–24), the narrator’s new wife, Rowena, dies, and by de-grees her body is transformed into that of Ligeia, who rises againto life. But what does it mean to say that Ligeia has returned?Who or what is Ligeia? At the beginning of the tale the narratorconfesses knowing neither how he met her nor her “paternalname” (p. 311). And aside from the above physical descriptions,which veer to abstract comparisons with inanimate things,Ligeia is characterized only as having an “immense” amount of


29 The difference in affect is attributable to a rigid economy in Poe’s writing: seeingor experiencing the telos of universal process inevitably comes at the cost of one’s indi-vidual life (Ligeia); while still a putative “individual,” one can only feel (both physicallyand spiritually) the “terror” of the self ’s disintegration without understanding it(Ligeia’s narrator). The human dramas of the tales thus enact, but conceal behindtheir affects, the ahuman mechanics of Eureka.



“learning” in “transcendentalism,” a “gigantic volition,” and,when nearing death, a “wild desire for life,—for life—but forlife” (pp. 315–17). Indeed, the only words we hear her speak(“Man doth not yield . . . to the angels, nor unto death utterly, saveonly through the weakness of his feeble will”) echo the tale’s epi-graph, which is attributed to someone else entirely (pp. 319,310). In every way, then, “Ligeia” labors to de-individualizeLigeia by denying her qualities other than those of the universe;she is merely a corporealization of “transcendentalism.” Em-bodying Eureka’s “Divine Volition” and “Life—Life—Life withinLife,” Ligeia is an abstraction made concrete. What survivesdeath, therefore, is not a person but an impersonal principle.What returns from the grave is Life itself.

If “Ligeia” makes Ligeia not a person but a common thingportending our ontological (dis)integration, then “The Fall ofthe House of Usher,” written only a year later, extends thisoffice to even more things in our lives, picturing yet more waysin which “we” are subjects of/to our surroundings. Indeed, thestory offers numerous synecdochic examples of the concreteforms that universal principle can assume, the most prominentof which is, of course, the House itself. Upon first arriving, thenarrator immediately registers the “unnerv[ing]” lifelikeness ofthe place: “The melancholy House of Usher” twice is said tohave “vacant eye-like windows”; indoors, too, things have theirown “atmosphere of sorrow” and “irredeemable gloom” that“h[angs] over and pervade[s] all.”30 The affective resonance ofthe location leads the narrator to question, in a manner remi-niscent of Ligeia’s husband, “What was it . . . that so unnervedme in the contemplation of the House of Usher?” (“House ofUsher,” p. 397). Though he does not arrive at a conclusive an-swer, he entertains a “strange fancy” that the environs aresomehow communally alive in their shared decay: “about thewhole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere pecu-liar to themselves . . . an atmosphere which had no affinity withthe air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed


30 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in Collected Works, II, 397–98,401; further references are to this edition and appear in the text.



trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn—a pestilent andmystic vapor” (pp. 399– 400).

Even more unnerving, the house’s “atmosphere” quicklybecomes the narrator’s own: “with the first glimpse of the build-ing, a sense of insufferable gloom pervade[s]” the narrator’s“spirit,” resulting in “an utter depression of soul” analogous to“the bitter lapse into every-day life” of waking from an opiumdream (“House of Usher,” p. 397). This disruption of the narra-tor’s putatively autonomous self through a confrontation withan object of “every-day life” exhibits “the vivid force of the sen-sations which oppressed [him]” (p. 399). The narrator, in otherwords, is not detached from the scene he surveys. Indeed, thefact that the “peculiar” affect of the scene becomes the narra-tor’s own, affecting him even physically, forces him to admit that“there are combinations of . . . natural objects which have thepower of thus affecting us” (p. 398). Though “analysis of thispower lies . . . beyond our depth” (p. 398), the fact that the nar-rator can feel a “power” in his surroundings at all suggests thatthe two are interrelated to an extent that complicates their dif-ferentiation. That affects or atmospheres might actually residein things and then possess persons, rather than the other wayaround, is a disconcerting proposition—but it is that one thetale embodies.

All of this could still be discounted as the narrator’s imagi-native projections were it not for what follows. Literalizing theindistinguishability of building and inhabitants inherent to the“equivocal appellation of the ‘House of Usher,’” the story dis-plays the effects of the mutual “influence” of structure and lin-eage over “the long lapse of centuries,” a reciprocal imbrica-tion made all the more incestuous because the “very ancient”family tree never “put forth . . . any enduring branch” that livedbeyond the mansion’s walls (“House of Usher,” pp. 398–99).Suffering equally from lines that are absences (the branchlessfamily tree; the “fissure” reaching from the top of the house’sroof to its foundation), the house and its eponymous ownersare connected by a common rupture that foreshadows theircollapse into one another. And Roderick Usher, last of the fam-ily line, knows it— or rather, he senses it. Indeed, Roderick’sself-avowed defining characteristic, and why he calls the narra-




tor to visit him, is a hysterical form of oversensitivity, “an exces-sive nervous agitation”:

the nature of his malady. . . . was . . . a constitutional and a familyevil . . . a mere nervous affection. . . . It displayed itself in a hostof unnatural sensations. . . . He suffered much from a morbidacuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone en-durable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; theodors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured byeven a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and thesefrom stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with hor-ror. (pp. 402–3)

Here is a pathology conducive if not to mental health then atleast to recognizing the preeminence of things in our lives. Rod-erick’s morbidly acute senses subject him to his environment,reducing him (and countless past generations of his family) tobeing a dependent effect of his surroundings.31 The result, then,of Roderick’s hyperattuned senses is not an exaltation of thesubject and its powers but an attenuation of him and them, theproduction of a state of being that threatens his life by over-whelming it with context. Roderick himself anticipates the in-escapable result of living in constant “terror” of “even the mosttrivial” thing: “I shall perish . . . I must perish” (p. 403).

We soon discover that this oversensitivity, and the threat toself that it makes visible, originates in Roderick’s relationshipwith his ancestral house:

He was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regardto the dwelling which he tenanted, and whence, for many years,he had never ventured forth—in regard to an influence whosesupposititious force was conveyed in terms too shadowy here tobe re-stated—an influence which some peculiarities in the mereform and substance of his family mansion, had, by dint of long


31 We can compare the narrator’s own “monomania” in “Berenice” (1835): “[it]consisted in a morbid irritability of those properties of the mind in metaphysical sci-ence termed the attentive. . . . [toward] the most ordinary objects of the universe”(Edgar Allan Poe, “Berenice,” in Collected Works, II, 211). The narrator stresses that this“absorption” is not based in “speculative” interest or “imagination” but is instead a purelysensory fixation on an “invariably frivolous” object (p. 212), such as Berenice’s teeth,which have “a sensitive and sentient power, and, even when unassisted by the lips, a ca-pability of moral expression” (p. 216).



sufferance . . . obtained over his spirit—an effect which thephysique of the gray walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn intowhich they all looked down, had, at length, brought about uponthe morale of his existence. (“House of Usher,” p. 403)

Baldly presenting the degree of “influence” that places haveover persons, this passage stresses Roderick’s consciousness ofthe causal link between “the mere form and substance of hisfamily mansion” and “the morale of his existence.” He knowsthat his body and “spirit” are nothing more than conditional,ephemeral effects of “the physique of the gray walls and turrets.”

This dominion of the house, its “force,” is subsequentlyrevealed to originate in its vitality, even its consciousness, asUsher’s general belief in “the sentience of all vegetable things.. . . assume[s] a more daring character, and trespasse[s] . . . uponthe kingdom of inorganization”:

The conditions of the sentience had been . . . fulfilled in themethod of collocation of these stones—in the order of theirarrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which over-spread them . . . —above all, in the long undisturbed endur-ance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still wa-ters of the tarn. Its evidence—the evidence of the sentience—was to be seen . . . in the gradual yet certain condensation ofan atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls. Theresult was discoverable . . . in that silent, yet importunate andterrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destiniesof his family, and which made him . . . what he was. (“House ofUsher,” p. 408)

An emblem of the ubiquity of life and sentience, the panpsychichouse gives form to the nebulous universals presented in Eureka,concretizing that essay’s broad assertion of the interconnectionand interinfluence consequent upon material unity. Fusingstones, fungi, trees, tarn, temporal duration (“centuries”), andobserver, the scene thus demonstrates Eureka’s “collocation” ofseemingly discrete things, including persons, into one (in)or-ganic whole. The Usher family, then, rather than freely tenant-ing the building, are themselves possessed by the house’s “at-mosphere”; though Roderick is the presumed master of the




ancestral manor, it is found to be sovereign over him: themoldering house “mould[s]” the family’s destiny and “ma[kes]”Roderick “what he [is].”

But what exactly is threatening about this understanding?Whence the “horror” and “terror”? Roderick, at least, feels thatuniversal life threatens his own being (“I shall perish . . . I mustperish”). And the story proves his premonition correct: Roder-ick dies at the tale’s end. But why? The idea that other thingshaving life and sentience should necessarily endanger our ownis perhaps confusing, especially given the generally positivetenor of panpsychic discourse at the time (as represented inRoderick’s own library).32 But insofar as “human” life and sen-tience are predicated upon assumptions of exclusivity and pre-eminence, it makes sense that “we” would be disturbed if ourdefining characteristics were found common. Moreover, in ad-dition to lessening our ontological distinctiveness, Poe’spanpsychism calls into question “our” autonomy; it is no longerclear in what sense “we” can be said to exist as independent be-ings once our physical, mental, and spiritual lives are revealedto be extensions of our now-sentient environments. In Poe’suniverse, sovereignty is necessarily an exclusive principle, per-taining either to a universe or a self, but never to both. Thehouse’s consciousness thus upsets the integrity and individual-ity of Roderick’s own mind by becoming its center, displacingits hermetic self-centeredness—a fact indicated by the readyslippage between Roderick’s self-consciousness of his “malady”and his obsessive consciousness of the consciousnesses of otherthings. For Poe the unity of the environment, its “peculiar at-mosphere” “of [its] own,” comes at the cost of the individualityof the particular things that comprise it. With unity there isscarcity, with singularity there is indistinction. For the Ushers,therefore, there is extinction.


32 The first recorded use of the word “panpsychism” in the Oxford English Dictionaryis from 1879, but the idea itself—that everything in the universe has some degree ofmental functioning—was circulating for some time previously. See, for example, Mab-bott’s note on the real published works collected in the fictional Usher library (see Col-lected Works, II, 419, n. 15), as well as one book not included: Gustav Fechner’s Nanna,or On the Mental Life of Plants (1848). See also David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).



The canonical interpretation of this conjunction of houseand family is that it somehow manifests the psychologicalpathologies of Roderick, the narrator, or Poe (or of all three).33

This answer is unsatisfying, however, inasmuch as it refuses tocountenance what the tale says things do and shows things do-ing; this interpretation bows to less strange because more hu-man- or self-centric conventions, the very conventions that thetale undermines. Roderick may be insane, and he may infectthe narrator with his insanity, but this is an effect rather than acause of the fantastical phenomena the story presents. As thenarrator only partially realizes, “much, if not all of what [he]felt, was due to the bewildering influence of the gloomy furni-ture of the room” (“House of Usher,” p. 411). Believing in “thesentience of all vegetable things” or the “influence of . . . furni-ture” is not in itself insane in Poe’s universe, but it may causeinsanity— one symptom of the estrangement from self thatcontact with things produces.34 Alternatively, insanity or a “mor-bid acuteness of the senses” may actually enable apprehen-sion of the normally unperceived nature of our relationship tothe things about “us,” thus serving much the same function asother altered states that disrupt normative self-identity in Poe’sfiction (such as mesmeric trances, opium reveries, and death).35

In either case, things are central to both the characters and thetales because they do not allow “us” to escape their influence.Poe thus demonstrates that the relationship between self andworld is defined not by their distance (whether psychical, lin-


33 Rather than the degenerative state of the House of Usher being a projection ofthe diseased mind of its tenant, as J. Gerald Kennedy, among others, claims (seeKennedy, “Introduction: Poe in Our Time,” in A Historical Guide, pp. 3–17), I believethat Poe presents the opposite scenario: the house directly effecting and (dis)orderingthe mind that is subject to it (and a subject of it). Rather than receiving the projectionsof selves, things here project onto selves.

34 This reading counters Lawrence Buell’s assertion that Poe implicitly denouncesRoderick’s Gothic pantheism as “a form of madness” incompatible with Poe’s own val-orization of rationalism (see Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writ-ing, and the Formation of American Culture [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of HarvardUniv. Press, 1995], p. 188).

35 See “Eleonora” (1841) and “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842) for other exam-ples in Poe’s writings of how both insanity and “swoons” put the conscious, integral selfin abeyance, thus facilitating apprehension of the self ’s dissolution by the larger universe.



guistic, or physical) but by their infinite proximity or artificialdifferentiation.36

My reading has thus far ignored what much recent criticismon “Usher” has seized upon: Roderick’s relationship with Made-line.37 I do not wish to slight the significance of the pairing, butI will depart from previous accounts of it. Roderick and Made-line are said to be twins of “striking similitude,” but the resem-blance is discovered by the narrator only following Madeline’sdeath (“House of Usher,” p. 410). Indeed, aside from a spectralappearance at the beginning of the story at the exact moment inwhich Roderick speaks of her imminent “decease” (p. 404),Madeline is absent from most of the tale, both physiologically(she is cataleptic) and spatially (she is confined to bed, out ofview), becoming truly present only in death. Once she becomesa “corpse,” however, once a thing like Ligeia rather than a per-son, her presence is felt everywhere. Roderick, especially, senseshis sister’s return. Due no doubt in part to the “sympathies of ascarcely intelligible nature [that] had always existed betweenthem” (p. 410), and in part to his acute hypersensitivity, Roder-ick hears Madeline’s efforts at escaping her tomb for days. Andat the last moments of her approach, his body itself begins toregister Madeline’s proximity, as he starts “rock[ing] from sideto side with a gentle yet constant and uniform sway” (p. 415).Like the sympathy between proximate “bodies” in Eureka, Made-line’s advance toward her brother changes “the motion of hisbody” (“House of Usher,” p. 415). And like Eureka’s final, in-


36 While Scott Peeples reads into Poe’s attention to house design an authorialmetapractice (“Poe uses the house to reflect upon literary structures”), my own inter-pretation would replace “literary” with “material” (see Peeples, “Poe’s ‘Constructive-ness’ and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’” in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar AllanPoe, ed. Kevin J. Hayes [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002], p. 180). In otherwords, Peeples wants, paradoxically, to deconstruct the story by making the House anallegory for the inevitable collapse of figuration, but I would argue that the House’s lit-eral de-construction embodies for Poe the inevitable tendency of matter, including per-sons, to collapse into unified indistinction.

37 See, for example, John Allison, “Coleridgean Self-Development: Entrapment andIncest in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’” South Central Review, 5, no. 1 (1988), 40 – 47;Robert Hoggard, “Pregnant Thoughts on ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’” Universityof Mississippi Studies in English, n.s. 7 (1989), 118–20; and Leila S. May, “‘Sympathies ofa Scarcely Intelligible Nature’: The Brother-Sister Bond in Poe’s ‘Fall of the House ofUsher,’” Studies in Short Fiction, 30 (1993), 387–96.



evitable collapse of differentiated materiality into a “commonembrace” of indistinction, Madeline’s “[falling] heavily inwardupon the person of her brother” brings both her and Roderickto the ground as “corpse[s]” (“House of Usher,” pp. 416 –17).The subsequent collapse of the house only punctuates the ab-soluteness of the convergence. Resonating with the language ofuniversal energies, a “life-like” “whirlwind,” a “gaseous exhala-tion which hung about and enshrouded the mansion,” and an“electrical phenomena” destroy the property, submerging it be-low the opaque waters of the tarn (pp. 412–13). In a significantanticipation of Eureka, only the “blood-red moon” remains overthe place where persons once were (“House of Usher,” p. 417).

The common thread throughout “The Fall of the Houseof Usher” is the inwardness of identity. Roderick’s nervous sen-sitivity to the mortal influence of a sentient environment,Madeline’s “inward” fall onto her brother, and the house’s finalcollapse all trope the story’s recurrent thematic of the inex-orable return to unity of spiritually interconnected matter. In atale obsessed with linearity (genealogical lines, poetic lines,sight lines, structural lines), the narrative traces how discretepoints finally coalesce back into a singularity. As a result, theline that divides self from world, the ontological barrier visual-ized in the written “I,” is shown to be ultimately incapable ofwithstanding the pressure of what lies without. The Ushers andthe House of Usher necessarily fall together because the logicof “The Fall of the House of Usher” is that identity is borne outin collapse and true unity is expressed in the erasure of distinc-tion. The tale thus exemplifies the idea that, in Poe’s universe,all unions are incestuous and issue in death.

In this fatal recognition of one’s self in the world, we can seethat the universe predicated in “Mesmeric Revelation” and Eu-reka (and embodied in “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House ofUsher,” as well as numerous other tales), though certainly sys-tematic in its (dis)integration of individual humans, is neithertriumphantly nor redemptively “post-human.” Unlike the cele-bratory, self-affirming, and self-perpetuating syntheses of sub-ject and object so commonly imagined in both nineteenth-century (meta)physical discourse and in current optimisticpost-humanisms, both of which fantasize not the death of the




human subject but only its edifying transformation into some-thing more, Poe’s nonproductive and unyielding vision of thepost-human insists on the overcoming of the subject by the ob-ject that it uncannily resembles, the loss of the putative individ-ual’s life to the world such that the “I,” too, becomes a thing; thepost-human for Poe, in other words, is Gothic rather thanutopic, something to be lived, if at all, by corpses rather than im-mortal persons. Thus, although he participates in his culture’sparticular “cosmontological” imaginary, Poe represents an inas-similable negativity within that culture’s twinned developmentalhistories of the Human and the Individual, histories whose post-mortems, despite the “post-human,” have yet to be written.38

Johns Hopkins University

ABSTRACT

Matthew A. Taylor, “Edgar Allan Poe’s (Meta)physics: A Pre-Historyof the Post-Human” (pp. 193–221)Edgar Allan Poe partakes of a social imaginary pursuing a single, unified theory of thephysical and metaphysical. In this essay I examine how Poe, rather than following thepredominantly utopian, utilitarian, and self-affirming teleologies of many such con-temporary discourses (mesmerism, spiritualism, etc.), pictures instead the unsettlingimplications for human ontology consequent upon the idea that persons are less au-tonomous or sovereign entities than mutable effects of external, inhuman forces. Rout-ing my discussion through a critical reading of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, Iargue that Poe’s cosmological poem-essay Eureka and much of his short fiction—including “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”—present a model of the uni-verse and of the natural world that actively erodes the distinctions separating humanityfrom its physical environment, indeed that finally refuses the differentiation of subjectand object altogether. My essay provides a brief genealogy for this macabre literaliza-tion of contemporary theories of the universe in Poe’s writing and explores the impli-cations that it has for a critical tradition (psychoanalytic, deconstructive, ideological)largely invested in the selves rather than the surroundings of Poe’s tales.

Keywords: Edgar Allan Poe; Eureka; “Ligeia”; “The Fall of the Houseof Usher”; mesmerism


38 For one account of the historical convergence of the discourses of individualityand humanity, see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sci-ences (New York: Vintage, 1970), pp. 373–86.



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