Deciphering Poe by Urakova Alexandra;

Author:Urakova, Alexandra;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lehigh University Press
Published: 2012-05-08T04:00:00+00:00

For Lucretius, as for Poe, deviation is the precondition of creation without which nothing is conceivable: invariant sameness is sterile and disallows both creation and creativity. In both the world and in writing, deviation in becoming is what makes becoming possible. Difference or differencing is not a stable quality internal to ontology but its determining aspect, its constitutive internal agitation that forms the underlying motivation of his fictional plots and even the narrative poems, most famously “The Raven.”

While Lucretius was content in his radical materialism to understand difference as genetic, Hegel wanted to put difference to work for progress through contradiction and sublation. This version of undoing seems nearer to Poe’s time and his practice. For Hegel, each entity found itself fulfilled in its other, a kind of figure/ground complementarity. For Hegel, every definition of an entity itself was found necessarily outside itself, a kind of apophatic realization. In this Hegel was affirming a Christian version of knowledge through negation, the via negativa of the Pseudo-Dionysius. Indeed, even earlier Erigena could write in his Periphyseon: “The creative nature permits nothing outside itself because outside of it nothing can be.”[4] In short, the individual is an emanation of the divine whose individuation is illusory and whose real existence is wholly in the corpus of God. Thus the perversity of mortification is the sensible exchange of the hubris of selfhood for the reincorporation in the body of divinity. This is the philosophical and religious context of Poe’s perverse, a seeming perversity only from the perspective of the scientifically secular and not of the dark supernal.

For Poe, as he makes clearest at the conclusion of Eureka, man has two identities and so two frames of reference for thought, and these diverge. The normal or rational supplies the usual criterion for evaluation and deviation, but that is because it judges by its own lower standard. Still, men are of two minds and therefore are double thinking, “conscious, first, of a proper identity; conscious secondly and by faint indeterminate glimpses, of an identity with the Divine Being of whom we speak.”[5] Individual identity is always already for Poe a swerving away from the totality that cannot be identified. That holism cannot fall under a name or representation since it forms the productive heterogenesis that is the whole cosmic ontology. This is the arena that Poe would have us reach—not as rational comprehension, since that would be oxymoronic, but in the disorientation of the centered subject, the protagonist, and in the sublime elevation of the reader.

His mastery of ratiocination—demonstrated through his detective, Dupin—and of taxonomy as in The Conchologist’s First Book—was but just the ground for deviation, for swerving. Order is then not his highest end but the presentation of a structure created for cancellation, for a nonprogressive cancellation into the nonparticular. This is not Hegelian sublation, for it postulates an eternal return, a universal cyclicality that always antagonizes the particulars it overcomes. But how is this inversion to be accomplished with language, a structure given to sameness and identity?

His aesthetics supplies a path.

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