The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 31: My Fancy Grew Charnel

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Every horror writer, good or bad, of the 20th century is a spawn of Edgar Allan Poe. Even if an individual writer sees himself as more a descendant of H. P. Lovecraft, say, he is a child of Poe. The entire genre as we understand it now, at least in literature, probably wouldn't exist without him. Peter Straub not only sees the man as a patriarch to the genre -- he edited an anthology in 2008 called Poe's Children -- but as an entire time period, or perhaps more accurately, as a beginning: volume one of his two-part anthology American Fantastic Tales is subtitled From Poe to the Pulps.
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Frequently, Poe is as much of an agitator among his readers as he is for other writers. Who among horror fans cannot count Poe as one of his earliest literary loves? For myself, my connection to the horror genre began with Stephen King, but my reading of Poe ran almost parallel, to the point where the two authors may have passed under my eye concurrently. Among Poe's classic stories, "The Tell-Tale Heart" has been read by me more times than any other short story (not the kind of distinction on which reputations are built, but at this point Poe doesn't need my help anyway). The reason I returned to that story so often in my youth is because of lines like "I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?" Poe's words can carry a pretty deep chill, even divorced from any context, and "The Tell-Tale Heart", which is unquestionably the story of a homicidal madman praying on a defenseless old man, just happens to also work if the reader takes the narrator at face value. If you're such a reader, you might want to rethink certain things about your life, but the story still works.
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I said before that I returned to that particular story over and over again "in my youth", implying I haven't been back to it in a while. This is true. Also true is that the same thing could be said of my recent experience of Poe's fiction as a whole, which is to say, there hasn't been any. It's hard to say for sure why this is, but I think I may have convinced myself that I would now find Poe tedious, and didn't want my fond old memories of his writing to be overwhelmed by modern disappointment. Looked at logically, it doesn't seem terribly realistic that my better-read adult self would find a writer like Poe tedious while my attention-span deficient younger self didn't, but there it is. This sad story has a happy ending, though, as I've taken Halloween Day, 2010, as an excuse to reacquaint myself with the man, dead now these past 161 years, as of October 7.
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I chose a scattering of Poe stories, culled from both his more obscure titles and from his established classics that I simply hadn't read yet. Of that sampling, the two most obscure stories turned out to be comedies (though with an underlying horror premise), and it's interesting to note that this is a form Poe worked in with some frequency, but none of his humor is remembered with anything like the cultural absorption of something like "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". His most famous humorous story would have to be "Never Bet the Devil Your Head", and I sometimes think that more people have seen Federico Fellini's also obscure, very hard to find short film adaptation of that story (called Toby Dammit, and part of an Italian horror anthology film called Spirits of the Dead) than have actually read it. If one were to go solely by one of the comic stories I read for today, "The Devil in the Belfry", the loss of Poe as a comic voice wouldn't be that hard to figure, and wouldn't be that lamentable, either. "The Devil in the Belfry" is a weird, not very funny story that seems to exist solely to express Poe's dislike of either Germans, or the Swiss, or whichever one of those speaks German but is renowned for making great clocks. You might say "Those are both things that Germans do", but the story is set in a town called Vondervotteimittiss, which, I don't know, sounds Scandinavian to me. In any case, the story doesn't really merit much consideration, being, as it is, just a silly manifestation of Poe's xenophobia (which wouldn't matter to me so much if the story were funnier). But another of Poe's forays into comedy, called "Loss of Breath", does.
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"Loss of Breath" is a story about a man who quite literally loses his breath. He's in the middle of screaming abuse at his wife on the morning after their wedding ("Thou wretch - thou vixen! - thou shrew!") when the breath simply deserts him. He doesn't die, but he does momentarily lose the power of speech. Eventually he's able to work out a different way of speaking, one not dependant on the regular release of breath, and even trains himself as an actor specializing in a particular role for which his tone of voice is well suited. But this man's life -- the life of Mr. Lackobreath, as he comes to call himself -- turns into a series of grotesque disasters, including being hanged from the neck (though not until dead, as the restriction of the rope would not impede his quality of life), the severing of his ears, the severing of his nose, and his premature interment in a burial vault, after he was believed dead by fellow passengers in a train car.
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That interment is not the end of the story, and despite all the horror listed above, Poe relates the story in a light-hearted tone. And it's actually quite funny. At one point, shortly after losing his breath, Mr. Lackobreath tries to find it again, actually, physically find his lost breath, following William Godwin's view that "invisible things are the only realities". However:
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My exertions, as I have before said, proved fruitless. Closet after closet -- drawer after drawer -- corner after corner -- were scrutinized to no purpose. At one time, however, I thought myself sure of my prize, having in rummaging a dressing-case, accidentally demolished a bottle of Granjean's Oil of Archangels -- which, as an agreeable perfume, I here take the liberty of recommending.
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"Loss of Breath" is full of that sort of bizarre aside, or casual understatement, as when our narrator's skull is fractured "in a manner at once interesting and extraordinary." More interesting, perhaps, than evidence of Poe's comedic prowess, is this story's relationship with so much of his other, less whimsical stories, including many of the ones I read for today. The borderline between life and death is one that fascinated Poe, and its one that Mr. Lackobreath walks throughout "Loss of Breath". One of the traditional ways an amateur checks for life in a body in repose is to hold a mirror in front of its mouth. The absence of fogged glass that results when Lackobreath's train companions try this is what lands him in an early grave. This mirror trick is also used to bolster the terrible belief of a group of doctors and mesmerists in one of Poe's most chilling stories, "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar".
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In this story, the title character is dying -- and the facts of his body's corruption are laid out by Poe in no little detail -- and as his future is hopeless he readily agrees to be used in the experiments of his friend and mesmerist, our narrator, known only as P____. Our narrator's idea is to entrance someone, as he puts it, "in articulo mortis", or literally "at the point of death". Valdemar's disease is such that the moment of his death can be pegged with some accuracy, and he remains contact with our narrator, and our narrator with Valdemar's doctors, so that the experiment can begin at the correct time, and so that this moment will not be missed.
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This moment is not missed, and when it arrives all the interested parties are gathered at Valdemar's death bed, and he is successfully mesmerized. Valdemar is terribly weakened at this point, but his mesmerist is able to control certain of his movements and even communicate. When asked if he's sleeping, Valdemar responds "Yes -- asleep now. Do not wake me! -- let me die so!" The astonishing thing, however, is that the hour judged by his doctors to be Valdemar's last comes and goes, yet Valdemar does not die, and instead remains mesmerized. He continues to answer questions, although his body seems to have shut down, so that his voice appears to come just from his wildly vibrating tongue, and from the depths of his throat, with no assistance from his entirely still lips. And eventually, when asked again if he's sleeping, he responds:
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Yes! -- no; -- I have been sleeping -- and now -- now -- I am dead.
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The question then becomes, should Valdemar be woken up? And if so, what will happen?
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"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" is as despairing and dark as anything Poe ever wrote, with any gray area over the states of life and death representing shrieking horror. That middle ground is not an afterlife, or a living death, as with zombies or vampires, but instead being buried alive, as in "Loss of Breath", or, in "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar", a death that still permits communication, not from heaven, or from reanimation -- the story's climax removes all possibility of either of those -- but from delay. The more I read of Poe, the more explicit becomes the source of this terrible intermediate state: the human knowledge of mortality. This is the seed of the entire horror genre, and the disease of Poe's imagination.
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Never has this been as clear as it is in "The Premature Burial", a story that is not, as I'd always believed, simply the chronicle of a man who has been buried alive. Rather, it is about the idea of being buried alive, and the unthinkable terror that must be felt by anyone who experiences it. At first a series of anecdotes about those who have felt this horror -- some who never lived to tell of it, some who did -- "The Premature Burial" doesn't begin to reveal itself as perhaps the ultimate expression of despair in Poe's life, and even of the genre, in its final pages, when the narrator who has been pondering the idea of early interment reveals that, due to his own medical condition, the symptoms of which can be mistaken for death, he lives in constant fear of waking from one of his spells to find himself encased in wood and covered with closely packed earth.
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In all that I endured there was no physical suffering, but of moral distress an infinitude. My fancy grew charnel, I talked "of worms, of tombs, and epitaphs." I was lost in reveries of death, and the idea of premature burial held continual possession of my brain. The ghastly Danger to which I was subjected haunted me day and night. In the former, the torture of meditation was excessive -- in the latter, supreme.
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So supreme, in fact, that at one point he experiences a horrible dream in which a man, or a kind of creature ("I was mortal," it says, "but am fiend.") takes our narrator on a journey of human misery, shown by his hideous guide in "the graves of all mankind":
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...and from each issued the faint phosphoric radiance of decay; so that I could see into the innermost recesses, and there view the shrouded bodies in their sad and solemn slumbers with the worm. But alas! the real sleepers were fewer, by man millions, than those who slumbered not at all; and there was a feeble struggling; and there was a general sad unrest; and from out the depths of the countless pits there came a melancholy rustling from the garments of the buried. And of those who seemed tranquilly to repose, I saw that a vast number had changed, in a greater or less degree, the rigid and uneasy position in which they had originally been entombed.
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And so within the story, the horrible but absurd implication is that more people are buried alive than are buried dead. In the world Poe, and the rest of us, lived and live in, however, this passage says that most of us can't sleep. Most of us are in a state of constant despair. Our beds are our graves, or might as well be, or will be soon enough. Few people who have ever walked the earth, Poe is saying, have ever really known peace. Why this should be is, as I've said, because we all know too well where it all leads.
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It's doubtful Poe would have thought of "The Premature Burial" this literally, and if he did it wouldn't have been in terms of genre, but rather his own brain. Even so, this story is as precise in its metaphor, not only of the story's horror, but of horror as a literary genre, as anything I've ever come across. "The Premature Burial" is horror, the entire history and philosophy of the genre concentrated into about ten pages. And, as horror sometimes does, it even offers, to those of us who love this genre but who may at times take it too close to heart, an alternative. After surviving a close call, our narrator finds his mood changing, his morbidity lifting, his approach to life more welcoming and curious and, simply, peaceful. As he reflects in the story's final paragraph:
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There are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad Humanity may assume the semblance of a Hell -- but the imagination of man is no Carathis, to explore with impunity its every cavern. Alas! the grim legion of sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful -- but, like the Demons in whose company Afrasiab made his voyage down the Oxus, they must sleep, or they will devour us -- they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish.
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Though Poe himself did not do so, these are words to live by, and as appropriate a sentiment on which to close out the month as I'll ever find.