Edgar Allan Poe's shockingly unsensational storytelling

It was more than eight long days ago – or perhaps more, or less, since I have taken no note of time – that I first opened Edgar Allan Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue and Other Tales. During the whole dull, dark and laborious process of reading these melancholy tales, I have found not one mote of joy. I have hardly even found interest. Rather, to an anomalous species of boredom I have found myself a bounden slave. The accumulation of woe after woe, horror upon horror – and of longueurs I still yet tremble to repeat – combined with the repetition of themes and ideas, has become an almost intolerable burden. Repetition! Did I just write repetition? The word hangs before my eyes, and although I have imbibed an immoderate dose of opium my mind apprehends it as clearly as the shaking hand before my face. The phantasmagoric …

… you get the idea. Poe, I'm sorry to say, is tough going. My progress through this book has been singularly slow. It's partly my fault, having been busy elsewhere. But better judges than me have also been complaining on this month's discussion boards:

MythicalMagpie writes:

I've only made it as far as The Fall of the House of Usher, and it's taking a damn long time to fall. It seems I can only read a couple of pages of Poe's writing before I fall asleep. There's a really hypnotic quality to all those tangled sentences. I confess to being a bit disappointed. Having read some of the authors who followed in his footsteps, I was expecting a bit more from the fount of all horror fiction.

My verdict – more effective than hot cocoa at bedtime.

It makes me wonder how seriously Poe expected his writing to be taken. Was he in fact a frustrated poet who needed to write sensational Gothic stories to put food on the table? Or would we need to go back a couple of hundred years to appreciate how far ahead of his time he really was?

Witchdoctor concurs: "I agree with you, a couple of pages is enough to send anyone to sleep."

Oranje14 says: "Hmmm … having read this recently I would say it's not scary at all, and by today's standards the plots are nothing to write home about."

I share this sense of disappointment. It turns out that the story I focused on last week, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, is something of a high point. There was enough good material and genuine inspiration there to make the silliness and verbosity of the rest forgivable. That's largely untrue of the rest of this collection.

Even the most famous stories, such as The Fall of the House Of Usher, left me cold. And not cold in a chills-up-the-spine sense: just a bit bored. The image of the house reflected in the black tarn is admittedly impressive. So too is the description of the crumbling house itself, and the "minute fungi" that cover its exterior. But the symbolism quickly becomes overbearing: the pathetic fallacy of the awful weather, the gothic archways, the wild guitar playing, the gloom, the doom, the adjectives pertaining to gloom and doom, the decayed trees. Too much! And that's before we get to the dialogue: "'I shall perish!'" said he. 'I must perish in this deplorable folly.'" You said it.

It's possible to defend Poe as a pioneer. Here we can see the model of haunted houses ever since. Generations of writers, not to mention special effects teams and film directors, have been inspired by him. Then again, his scary buildings and emotional weather patterns aren't a patch on those described by Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights, while his gothic excesses don't compete with those conjured by writers such as Matthew Lewis and Ann Radcliffe half a century earlier.

So why do we still read Poe? Is he simply a curio - an early American writer with a crazy personal life? I hesitate to say that, for I still haven't read enough, for a start. And even though I've frequently been bored, I've found odd moments fascinating, and gloriously weird. What is this thing about female corpses, for instance? Good job he was born before psychotherapy.

Others in the reading group, meanwhile, have eloquently defended his writing. nilpferd, for instance, demolishes plenty of the arguments I've made above.

I think you're reading these tales somewhat at face value as 'literature' and not paying enough attention to the ideas contained within. Poe's real skill, I feel, was his ability to engage the imagination and to explore new ways of inhabiting the reader's mind. I wouldn't argue that his prose, his plots, or his descriptions were exemplary, but I would argue that his stories were a milestone in writers' relationships with their readers.

jmschrei concurs:

For all the criticism that self-proclaimed 'higher' literary sorts may want to heap on Poe, he was a consummate story teller. He was also a commercial writer supporting himself through his craft. One can well imagine his tales being read aloud at social gatherings in his day.

G1eenJ also raises an interesting point about interpretation.

Is it his sanity or mine which is being called into question? And at exactly which point have I allowed myself to be undermined by the narrator?

There's always a curiosity in Poe about how literally we should take things. How much is the product of a diseased mind? How much springs from the imagination and a combination of gloomy physical settings and depression? How much is supernatural?

On this note, nilpferd (again) quotes Italo Calvino explaining why he chose to include "The Tell Tale Heart" in an anthology, and suggesting that it's in the realm of the psychological that the opium-drenched author is most interesting.

All of Poe's idiosyncratic traits: the crumbling house that exudes an aura of dissolution, the lifeless woman, the man absorbed in esoteric studies, premature burial, the dead woman who leaves her grave. Afterward, all the literature of decadentism was able to feed on those motifs; the film industry, since its very beginnings has propagated them to the point of saturation … I wanted a different Poe to open this second part, the Poe who inaugurates a new kind of fantastic tale, one obtained using the very limited means that will dominate the second half of the century: the completely mental and psychological fantastic story.

Nilpferd explains:

In Calvino's view the most lasting legacy of Poe's work was his introduction in this tale of a murderer's interior monologue; locking us into the mind of a madman, Poe achieves a far more chilling result than he ever did with Gothic imagery, graves, and crumbling houses.

I'm prepared to buy that line. I'm going to read "The Tell Tale Heart" next and keep plodding on. Hopefully next week I'll have something more positive to say. I might also see if I can watch a film adaptation of a story. In the meantime, what else should we make of Poe?