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The Putrescent Principle

Edgar Allan Poe

Macabre metaphysics

EDGAR ALLAN POE’S first short published story, ‘Metzengerstein: A Tale in Imitation of the German’ (1832), is explicitly concerned with metaphysics. Its central conceit of metempsychosis – an idea that Poe would return to in works like ‘Morella’ (1835) and ‘Ligeia’ (1838) – concerns the transmigration of the soul, and manifests in the form of a grotesque horse with the soul of a man, a liminal figure somewhere between life and death, human and animal. The horse becomes the obsession of Frederick, the Baron Metzengerstein, a likely arsonist who burned down the stables of his neighbours, the Berlifitzing family, with whom his own family had long feuded. The horse, branded with the letters ‘W.V.B.’, is implied to be possessed by the spirit of William von Berlifitzing, who died trying to save one of the horses. Poe emphasises the steed’s repulsiveness: it possesses ‘gigantic and disgusting teeth’ and ‘distended lips’, and its rider, Frederick, contracts from the beast ‘a hideous and unnatural fervour’ described as a ‘morbid melancholy’.¹ From the outset Frederick is fascinated by the creature: upon first seeing its representation in a tapestry, ‘his eyes [become] unwittingly riveted’ to the ‘unnaturally coloured’ thing, and his lip twitches with a ‘fiendish expression… without his consciousness’, his gaze returning inexorably to the image ‘mechanically’ (p. 160). Here Poe simultaneously erodes the individual agency of the baron while hinting that the horse may be the product of his unconscious mind, adding another layer of paradox to the already contradictory beast. The baron’s infection by the monstrous horse, itself an abominable amalgam transgressing both physical and metaphysical boundaries, serves to blend the hideous steed and its rider together, the two blurring into a single, categorically confused horror. This union, in which the human and the non-human meld and melt, dissolving into one another and, finally, into the flaming hulk of the baron’s castle, is inseparable from the revulsion it elicits.

Poe repeatedly returns to the idea of consciousness surviving death, blurring the boundary between living and dead, between matter and spirit, threatening to collapse the subject’s perceptions and the objective world-in-itself. As such, we can read Poe’s fiction as aspiring to connect, through art, the supposedly unbridgeable gap between phenomena and noumena upon which Kant and his correlationist disciples so emphatically insist. In ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ (1845), one of his most famous stories, Poe again depicts a grotesque undead being, the eponymous tubercular Valdemar, dead and yet speaking, hypnotised by the narrator. Valdemar’s decomposing cadaver remains ‘alive’ and speaking in a paradoxical state between death and life. His speech itself is rendered repulsively physical, its syllables slimy: Poe describes it as impressing upon the auditory senses ‘as gelatinous or glutinous matters impress the sense of touch’, a mucilaginous synaesthesia, but also as moving beyond our full comprehension, ‘the hideous whole’ of this speech being decidedly ‘indescribable’, manifesting as if from a great distance.² At the end of the tale, Valdemar finally collapses, rapidly rotting in the hands of the narrator into ‘a nearly liquid mass of loathsome – of detestable putrescence’ (p. 21), the quintessence of decay, in which the contradictory metaphysical states Valdemar embodies at last decompose into a putrid unity.

I am not the first, of course, to notice that stories like ‘Metzengerstein’ or ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ are disgusting. Adam Frank, in his discussion of Valdemar’s wagging tongue as a figure for the then-emerging technology of electromagnetic telegraphy (conveying, as it does, the impression of speech from a great distance, invested with a strange simultaneity), argues that Valdemar’s disgusting decomposition functions as part of a complicated joke on Poe’s part, using disgust in a kind of ‘decontamination script’ in which a struggle over the ‘purity’ of language is parodied by the power struggle between the mesmerist and Valdemar’s mesmerised corpse.³ My readings below certainly do not aim to overturn interpretations invested in Poe’s interests in technology, sociality and the writing process, such as Frank offers. Rather I want to claim that the aestheticised disgust in Poe’s writing does something else as well, something that later weird writers looking back to Poe would excitedly draw upon themselves. Disgust, in Poe’s writing, helps us to speculate about those things that otherwise lie beyond the borders of our thought, things that are ‘hideous beyond conception’.⁴ To read Poe’s proto-weird tales of premature burial, mesmerised corpses and death-in-life is to experience, however fleetingly, a kind of dissolution of the self brought about by aestheticised disgust.

Carolyn Korsmeyer argues in Savoring Disgust: The Foul & the Fair in Aesthetics (2011) that the disgusting in art exposes us to truths that are difficult to grasp, ‘existential truths’ whose magnitude ‘slips through the mind and cannot be held’, reminding us, for example, that ‘our corporeal selves will suffer disintegration and putrefaction’.⁵ Disgust serves in Poe’s tales as a means of thinking about concepts that are hard to comprehend or keep firmly in mind. Eugene Thacker, paraphrasing Quentin Meillassoux, argues that there are certain ideas that are difficult for philosophy to tackle, ideas that lie at the border of the unthinkable and so engender ‘a vicious cycle of logical paradox’.⁶ Following Meillassoux and his description of Kantian correlationism, Thacker specifically identifies the thought of the world-in-itself as an especially difficult idea to cognise which horror renders at least partially thinkable. It is precisely thoughts of the relation between the knowing subject and the non-human world that Poe’s horror fiction, with its disgust-provoking scenes, explores. In this way, Poe’s horror also responds to crises in philosophy – although, perhaps, unintentionally – specifically, as I will show, by conjuring through art what the German idealist Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling calls the Absolute.

Poe was clearly aware of both the revoltingness and the mystical qualities of his fiction. In a retort to a now lost letter from Thomas White, editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, who had evidently disapproved of certain aspects of Poe’s horrific story of mutilation and madness ‘Berenice’ (1835), Poe justifies his grotesque excesses in primarily commercial terms, but his defence of the tale also touches on the mystical. He notes that the antebellum reading public is hungry for horrors, and that while ‘Berenice’ may approach ‘the very verge of bad taste’, tales that tiptoe up to this line ‘are invariably sought after with avidity’. He characterises the ‘nature’ of such sought-after tales as ‘the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical’.⁷ Poe’s motivations for writing stories of horror and mysticism were at least significantly commercial, though as Sean McAlister observes, there is no reason ‘to continue viewing Poe’s authorial motivations as either exclusively artistic or exclusively mercenary’.⁸ The point here is that whether or not Poe was explicitly interested in exploring metaphysical ideas in his fiction, he understood that the reading public was fascinated both by the grotesque and by the ‘strange and mystical’ – that antebellum readers had an appetite for metaphysical horror. Judging from White’s later recrimination in the 1839 issue of Southern Literary Messenger, Poe’s tales were still perceived in close relation to ‘gloomy German mysticism’ years later with ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839). White insists that Poe is too inclined to ‘the relish of gross pleasures’, writing that Poe’s stories possess ‘great power’, but ultimately leave only a ‘painful and horrible impression’, and he warns Poe that to become ‘a useful and effective writer’ he must completely divorce himself ‘from that sombre school’ of Germanism.⁹ In his efforts to sell his fiction, Poe is clearly ready to draw on the vogue for horror, Germanism and the metaphysical.

We might expect, given the prominence of spectrality in the gothic tradition, for Poe’s fiction to draw on an essentially Cartesian metaphysics emphasising the duality of body and spirit – while certainly not all gothic texts are necessarily committed to such dualism, the implication of many conventional ghost stories is to imply the presence of immaterial substance. Such dualism, however, is neither the ontology of the gloomy German ‘mystics’ that White charges Poe with excessive attachment, nor the ontology born out in the stories themselves. From the flickering undead tongue and liquid putridity of Valdemar to the grotesque fusion of horse and man in ‘Metzengerstein’ to the monstrously embodied hauntings of ‘Morella’ and ‘Ligeia’, Poe’s stories trouble substance dualism rather than confirm it. In this chapter, I pursue the link between the disgusting and the metaphysical in Poe’s writing in relation to the philosophy of Schelling, who claimed that art is the ‘universal organon of philosophy’ and that it could thus truly represent that which philosophy could only abstractly describe at a remove.¹⁰ In obsessively returning to conceptions of personal and cosmic dissolution, a recurring ontological nightmare in which everything slides towards a hungry homogeneity, Poe’s tales enact the central drama of Schelling’s thought. This state of indifferentiation, in which all distinctions become meaningless, closely resembles what Schelling calls the ‘Absolute’ or ‘Absolute identity’, in which the differences between subject and object collapse to reveal a primal oneness. For Schelling, only art can reveal the Absolute: philosophy remains limited by the seeming division between consciousness and the world-in-itself, which only art uniquely collapses. Art thus works to undo the antinomy between phenomena and noumena identified by Kant as the basis for his ban on dogmatic metaphysics but understood by the German idealists as a problem to be solved.

Before beginning my analysis of Poe’s fiction, I first consider Poe’s familiarity with Schelling and recent scholarship that has considered Poe and Schelling together. I also discuss Poe’s aesthetic theories and metaphysical thinking to address possible objections to a metaphysical reading of Poe, given his emphasis on artistic autotelism. Next, I consider two stories of putrescent, possessed brides, ‘Morella’ and ‘Ligeia’. In these two stories, I examine the way that Poe subverts the typical nineteenth-century aestheticisation of the female consumptive and cadaver, using the affective potency of disgust to confront rather than console. Both texts use the decomposing and metamorphosing cadavers of women to represent the breakdown of subjectivity in the face of the all-consuming Absolute; the bodies of Poe’s diseased brides are always on the verge of becoming something other, hinting at some primal oneness resembling the Schellingian Absolute. I conclude the chapter with an examination of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and the murky unity of the abysmal tarn at its core to better conceptualise the seemingly paradoxical attractions of entropy and the destruction of the self.¹¹

The abominable absolute

To read Poe metaphysically is not to deny that he can also be read psychologically or sociopolitically, or to privilege a metaphysical reading over these other, perfectly viable accounts, but rather to tease out a particular version of Poe’s fiction that would become extremely important for later authors of weird fiction. Such authors look back to Poe as an important precursor to their own often more overt efforts to speculatively uncover some version of ultimate reality. For Lovecraft in particular, Poe is the ‘opener of artistic vistas’, which reveal ‘the terror that stalks about and within us, and the worm that writhes and slavers in the hideously close abyss’. For the likes of Lovecraft, then, Poe is a visionary whose fiction possesses a cosmic dimension, one of ‘festering horror’ and ‘horrible half-knowledge’, of a non-human, mind-independent reality which presses close upon us but from which we are normally cut off.¹²

The full extent of Poe’s familiarity with German philosophy has been subject to scholarly debate, but there is a growing understanding of Poe as receptive to some of Schelling’s ideas. Certainly, Germanic elements and references permeate Poe’s work both explicitly and stylistically: Charles Baudelaire called Poe’s mind at once ‘profoundly Germanic’ and ‘sometimes deeply Oriental’.¹³ Poe himself was sometimes ambivalent about his ‘Germanic’ influences, insisting that the horror of his tales was fundamentally of the soul rather than of Germany per se.¹⁴ He likely derived some of his knowledge of German philosophy (including Schelling) in translation and second-hand, through sources such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), the writings of Thomas Carlyle and Thomas de Quincey, and various periodicals including The Dial and Blackwood’s Magazine. Recent reassessments of Poe and Schelling have taken care not to attribute to Poe an expertise with German culture and philosophy that did not exist. Rather, as Sean Moreland and Devin Zane Shaw argue, ‘Poe’s reception, or misprision of Schelling’s ideas had a much more vital influence on his thought and writing’ than has been previously suggested.¹⁵

Aspasia Stephanou argues that Poe’s stories reflect some of Schelling’s philosophy. Stephanou suggests that Poe’s stories of dying women intertwine nineteenth-century medical discourses around consumption with Schellingian philosophy, reflecting what she calls a ‘dark vitalism’. Stephanou argues that Poe’s interpretation of the metaphysics of unity diverges substantially from the account of the transcendentalists. While the transcendentalists sought to ‘elevate spirituality’, Poe rather sought to expose what Stephanou calls ‘the dark life writhing behind the mask of spiritualism and theological mysticism’.¹⁶ In other words, Poe perceives in the Schellingian Absolute something disturbing rather than uplifting. The approaches of scholars such as Moreland, Shaw and Stephanou have built a foundation for a metaphysical Poe, but none of these critics has considered the relationship between Poe’s writing, Schellingian metaphysics and the affect of disgust, which I argue is the key to the ways that Poe’s texts convey the unthinkable. My intervention in the study of Poe is not simply to link Poe with Schelling but to explicate the ways that disgust specifically, when approached using a cognitivist aesthetics, enables a kind of metaphysical speculation – even if this is not, strictly speaking, part of Poe’s primary authorial intention. My contention in this chapter is that Poe’s tales – intentionally or otherwise – create aesthetic encounters with the Absolute.

Schelling has recently undergone something of a philosophical reappraisal, inspiring speculative realists such as Iain Hamilton Grant, who in Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (2006) uses Schelling as his philosophical foundation for thinking through a new naturphilosophie that moves beyond correlationism, or what Grant calls a ‘two-worlds metaphysics’, accommodating our modern world of climatic disaster, energy shortages and the other assorted apocalypses unleashed by the Anthropocene. As Grant puts it, Schelling is, in a sense, a ‘contemporary philosopher’ precisely because he ‘provides a rare instance of the as yet mostly untried consequences of exiting the Kantian framework which has held nature in its analogical grasp for the two hundred years since its inception’.¹⁷ Quite apart from Poe’s own interest in Schelling, then, or the body of scholarship that has begun to link the two, Schelling would be relevant to a metaphysical reading of weird fiction for his own contributions to philosophising about the Absolute.

What, then, is the Absolute for Schelling? Put most simply, the Absolute is ‘the coincidence of an objective with a subjective’ as Schelling writes in System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). The ‘objective’ is the world of nature, the ‘subjective… on the contrary, the self, or the intelligence’. As Schelling observes, these two concepts are ‘mutually opposed’, and it seems difficult to imagine a system that does not grant one or the other a kind of primacy over its opposite: we must either ‘make an intelligence out of nature, or a nature out of intelligence’.¹⁸ It is Schelling’s goal to solve this contradiction, a contradiction with implications for what Grant calls Kant’s two-worlds metaphysics. As Thacker writes of Schelling’s philosophy: ‘for Schelling, the key intuition was that the self that thinks about the world is also part of the world, and it is a mistake to presume that there is first a separately existing self that then turns towards and reflects on the world as an object’.¹⁹

Like the other German idealists – most notably Fichte and Hegel – Schelling’s philosophy builds on Kant’s, but where Kant maintains a staunch separation between phenomena and noumena, the German idealists approach this split as a crisis to be solved. Schelling is committed to a kind of monism in which everything – human beings, objects, nature – is ultimately part of a single whole, and in which there is ‘identity’, in the philosophical sense, between the knowing subject and the object of thought. As Schelling succinctly puts it in the second edition of Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1803): ‘Nature should be Mind made visible, Mind the invisible Nature.’²⁰ Unlike Fichte, whose system does away with things-in-themselves altogether and posits the subject itself as producing the world, Schelling attempts to incorporate elements of Spinoza’s pantheistic philosophy into his own thinking, noting that Spinoza was ‘the first who, with complete clarity, saw mind and matter as one, thought and extension simply as modifications of the same principle’ – or, as Schelling puts it in his later, unfinished work, The Ages of the World (1815), Spinoza was the most cognisant of ‘a dark feeling of… primordial time’, a unity which heals the wound made by Descartes when he ‘lacerated the world into body and spirit’.²¹ Schelling recuperates the supposedly ‘dogmatic’ philosopher’s idea of a single, monist nature – Spinoza’s pantheistic God – while taking pains to avoid some of the potentially deterministic consequences he sees in Spinozist monism. In this sense, Schelling is neither an idealist in the subjective, immaterialist meaning of the term as attributed to philosophers like George Berkeley, nor a Fichtean transcendental idealist making the subject the centre of his philosophy at the expense of the world-in-itself. He is trying, rather, to unite on the one hand what he calls a ‘transcendental philosophy’, one ‘proceeding from the subjective’, and a ‘nature-philosophy’, one proceeding from the objective. He insists that ‘how both the objective world accommodates to presentations in us, and presentations in us to the objective world, is unintelligible unless between the worlds, the ideal and the real, there exists a predetermined harmony’.²² This harmony is the Absolute. In The Philosophy of Art (1845) Schelling contends that ‘the universe (by which we always mean the universe in itself, eternal and unbegotten) – the universe is, like the Absolute, utterly One, indivisible, since it is the Absolute itself’.²³ This establishes what Thacker, in his work on Schelling, calls ‘a continuum that stretches without demarcations between the world-for-us and the world-in-itself’.²⁴ The Absolute is a metaphysical totality encompassing both the thoughts of individual subjects and the world-in-itself, uniting the thinking mind and the mind-independent world.

Recent Schelling scholarship has suggested that there is something ‘monstrous’ about Schelling’s Absolute. As Theodore George notes, Schelling identifies tragedy as the highest art because of its ability to ‘remedy the shortcomings of philosophy’ through its capacity to capture both the conflict between the reasoning subject and the objective world and their ultimate unity. Tragedy, George points out, represents a unity ‘marked much more by strife, contradiction, and incompleteness than anything else’.²⁵ It is this monstrous dimension of the Schellingian Absolute that Poe taps into in his horror stories – stories that consummate the Schellingian reunion of subject and object through disgust, an affect predicated on contradiction and the precariousness of boundaries.

Poe’s debts to Schelling are better understood if we consider Poe’s incorporation of certain metaphysical ideas into his poetry, specifically Eureka (1848), and look for a moment at the direct correspondences between the writing of Schelling and Poe. As previously noted, in all likelihood Poe derived much of his knowledge of Schelling’s philosophy from British Romantic writers such as Coleridge, who praises Schelling effusively: he describes the German thinker as responsible for a veritable ‘revolution in philosophy’. Biographia Literaria contains a number of distinctly Schellingian passages, including near plagiaristic paraphrases of Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism:

Now the sum of all that is merely objective we will henceforth call nature, confining the term to its passive and material sense, as comprising all the phenomena by which its existence is made known to us. On the other hand the sum of all that is subjective, we may comprehend in the name of the self or intelligence.²⁶

Like Schelling, Coleridge maintains that ‘during the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority belongs’, and that they therefore become ‘coinstantaneous and one’ in an ‘intimate coalition’. Like Schelling he searches for absolute truth, ‘self-grounded, unconditional, and known by its own light’. He thus seeks to combine idealism with ‘the truest and most binding realism’ in order to avoid exile to what he calls ‘a land of shadows’ that ‘surrounds us with apparitions’, just as Schelling unites nature-philosophy and transcendental philosophy.²⁷

Poe singles out Schelling in his ‘Exordium’ in the 1842 issue of Graham’s Magazine, describing Schelling as one of several German authors worthy of respect for their ‘more careful elaboration, their greater thoroughness, their more profound analysis’ than their British counterparts.²⁸ Poe’s own metaphysical views can be slippery, but what he discloses is consistent with the sort of universe that Schelling and Coleridge describe. Perhaps the closest Poe comes to espousing his metaphysics in detail is the long, often opaque prose poem Eureka, which expresses various ideas strongly reminiscent of Schelling’s Absolute and which evinces the very mystical character Poe criticises elsewhere. In Eureka, Poe writes that the universe began with an ‘Original Unity of the First Thing’ and that its seeming diversity or heterogeneity disguises the ‘sublimity of its oneness’.²⁹ He stresses the difficulty of capturing certain ideas, noting that the idea of ‘infinity’ cannot actually lead a mind to grasp infinity, but rather constitutes ‘the representative but of the thought of a thought’ (p. 22). Poe thus hopes that his poem will function as a kind of ‘mental gyration of the heel’ (p. 9), turning readers on the summit of a figurative Mount Ætna in a kaleidoscopic blurring-together of the seemingly differentiated universe. It is back into this ‘original Unity’ (p. 141), Poe claims at the poem’s end, that the tendency towards collapse will inevitably pull the universe till everything is drawn into ‘a final agglomeration of all things’ (p. 132).

The agglomeration into which, Poe suggests, everything will converge possesses a pantheistic quality that resembles the Absolute of Schelling or the immanent, pantheistic God of Spinoza, since in it ‘the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness’ (p. 143). What we call ‘The Universe’, Poe writes, is in fact but the ‘present expansive existence’ of a ‘Divine Being, who thus passes his Eternity in perpetual variation of Concentrated Self and almost Infinite Self-Diffusion’ – all organisms, all life and, indeed, everything in the universe, even those things we might ‘deny life for no better reason than that [we] do not behold it in operation… are really but infinite individualizations of Himself’ (p. 142). God may currently be individualised into diverse manifestations, ‘the diffused Matter and Spirit of the Universe’ (p. 141), but this differentiation is an illusion which the spiritual and physical gravitational collapse of everything into itself will banish. Poe’s vision of this apocalyptic future, in which everything is drawn back together, is described in terms of the unthinkable. He writes of ‘unfathomable abysses’, from which ‘unimaginable suns’ will glare, and describes the entire process, the universe’s ‘appetite for oneness’, as an ‘inevitable catastrophe’ (p. 136), even while at the same time this sinking ‘into Nothingness’ and ‘Material Nihility’ (p. 139) will also give way to a throbbing ‘Heart Divine’ (p. 139) and the renewal of the universe.

Eureka’s status within Poe’s critical framework is difficult to discern, but he offers the poem ‘not in its character of Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truths’ (p. 5), closely linking metaphysical truth and the aesthetic in a way one might not expect from the curmudgeonly advocate of art for art’s sake. It is given ‘to those who feel rather than to those who think’ (p. 5), suggesting that affect and feeling, here, are superseding rational inquiry. Early in the text, Poe offers an account of intuition that specifically touches on a two-worlds metaphysics, describing two philosophers, Aries and Hog. Aries, using a priori philosophy, Poe directly associates with noumena, while Hog’s system ‘depended on phenomena’ (p. 11). But so great is the admiration of all for Hog, Poe writes, ‘that a virtual stop was put to all thinking, properly so called’, and ‘no man dared utter a truth for which he felt himself indebted to his soul alone’ (p. 12), with anyone who defied this ban being branded a ‘theorist’ and ignored (p. 13). By ‘cultivating the natural sciences to the exclusion of Metaphysics’ (p. 14), Poe suggests, we neglect the power of intuition, of speculation and imagination. Godhead, the primal unity, may seem at first beyond our comprehension, since ‘in order to comprehend what he is, we should have to be God ourselves’ (p. 28), but of course, for Poe – and for Schelling, as for Spinoza before him – ultimately, we are.

If we take Eureka as an earnest description of Poe’s metaphysical views, or at least a tentative one, we can see a resemblance between the universe he envisions and the one that Schelling’s philosophy describes. Poe’s cosmos is fundamentally monist, and his Divine Being, like Schelling’s Absolute, suffuses what seem like individual subjects and the non-human world, ultimately collapsing the two into one another. Poe’s description of the forces of ‘Attraction and Repulsion’ as matter itself (p. 138) closely accords with Schelling’s insistence that even seemingly dead or inert matter consists of ‘a space limited by attractive and occupied by repulsive forces’.³⁰ Poe thus shares with both the American transcendentalists and Schelling a rejection of a ‘mechanistic’ universe in favour of one characterised by unity. Where the transcendentalists put great emphasis on individualism and the self, however ‘the first principle of Poe’s cosmology is that the universe actively erodes that which can only heuristically be called “human,” “individual,” or “self”’. As Matthew Taylor puts it, Poe’s stories in fact enact ‘a perverse yet consistent calculus that unites everything in existence under a universal law that, by definition, eliminates all differences’. Thus, we must think of Poe’s universe as one filled with a cosmic force, a force ‘not in the service of human interests’ but rather ‘asocial, and nonhuman’, relegating human beings to ‘at best, an ephemeral existence’, one undermining individuality and uniqueness.³¹

Despite his metaphysical speculations and intuitions in Eureka, Poe was, at times, rather cantankerous about metaphysics, and pokes fun at monist ontology in stories like ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’ (1838) when his narrator, Signora Psyche Zenobia, is advised by Mr Blackwood to adopt ‘the tone metaphysical’, and to ‘put in something about the supernal oneness’, while avoiding all mention of ‘the infernal twoness’. It is clear, though, that Poe is engaging as much in self-parody here as he is skewering other authors, when he writes of a supposedly model story of premature burial ‘full of taste, terror, sentiment, metaphysics, and erudition’.³² As Moreland and Shaw suggest, Poe’s ‘penchant for ambiguous parody’ makes his true feelings somewhat murky – insofar as he mocks Coleridge and his influences, he may well have been at pains to avoid being ‘perceived as an imitator of British writing’, and, in any event, ‘Poe notoriously evinces the greatest scorn for those writers from whom he has borrowed the most’. While various parodic and tonally ambiguous references to Schelling in Poe’s writing may vex Schellingian interpretations of Poe, his indebtedness to that ‘absurd metaphysician’, as Poe refers to Schelling in a cut reference that survives as a footnote in ‘Loss of Breath’ (1832), has been underestimated, especially insofar as Poe, like Schelling, rejects mechanistic materialism. Moreland and Shaw also point out that while Poe was keen at times to publicly repudiate German writers, his seeming annoyance with Germanism ‘does not seem to apply to Schelling’, and by 1839 at least had stopped being ‘the butt of Poe’s parodies and instead becomes praised as a critic’. Had Schelling read Poe’s fiction, they muse, he ‘would have found himself in the position of the narrator of “William Wilson”, unable to recognize his reflection, but unable to shake its haunting, and strangely familiar, aspect’.³³

So far, I have pointed out a number of similarities between Schelling’s conception of the Absolute and Poe’s metaphysics, made a case for Poe’s familiarity with Schelling’s writing (in part through Coleridge) and suggested that Poe’s interest in using quasi-German idealist or ‘mystic’ elements in his fiction is linked to his understanding of the antebellum reading public’s desire for horrific, metaphysical fiction. I also want to suggest that while Poe may not have set out primarily to instil in his readers specific metaphysical insights, the idea that certain aesthetic encounters can help us to think about things which are otherwise difficult to cognise is not in itself incompatible with Poe’s famously anti- didactic critical theory.

Poe writes in the posthumously published essay ‘The Poetic Principle’ that ‘the demands of Truth are severe’ and that ‘all that which is so indispensable in Song, is precisely all that with which she has nothing whatever to do’.³⁴ Poe argues that poetry is not well suited to articulating those forms of ‘Truth’ which arise from ‘the satisfaction of Reason’ (p. 6). However, Poe admits that both ‘the precepts of Duty’ and ‘the lessons of Truth’ can be introduced to a work of art ‘and with advantage’, provided that they do not subsume the ‘real essence’ of the poem (p. 8), and even this ‘real essence’ is described as more than appreciating ‘the Beauty before us’ (p. 7). Rather, Poe urges, art is inspired by ‘a wild effort to reach the Beauty above’, by ‘an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave’ and reflections on ‘eternity’ (p. 7). Art, for Poe, is excited by ‘our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and for ever, those divine and rapturous joys of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses’ (p. 7). Poe’s language, saturated with talk of souls, inner essences, immortality, eternity and the world beyond mundane existence, is all explicitly metaphysical. The poetic sentiment he describes is a longing to reach beyond the obvious sorts of beauties that simply appear before us, what we might call the beauties of mere phenomena and reach instead for a never-wholly-grasped beauty associated with aspects of reality outside our normal scope. But instead of drawing on the language and imagery of the sublime, as one might expect from Poe’s American transcendentalist contemporaries, Poe turns instead to the revolting and the deliquescent. His vertiginous approach to something like Schelling’s Absolute is propelled not through the sublime but through aesthetic encounters with disgust.

As recent affect theorists assert, disgust is often called on to police the boundaries of selfhood. Disgust is a peculiar, often unstable emotion – both profoundly embodied and, simultaneously, shaped by social forces. While its manifestations are varied and manifold, disgust is frequently tied to the transgression of boundaries, to liminal spaces such as bodily orifices and to processes of transformation such as death and decay. As Korsmeyer argues, disgust is ‘a response to the transition between life and death – to that which has recently died and is falling apart, to waste that was food and is now used up, to the mindless life-forms that invade and complete the process of disintegration’.³⁵ In this she echoes Aurel Kolnai’s reading of putrefaction as the ‘prototypical object of disgust’, foremost of the nine principal types of disgust-elicitors that he delineates. For Kolnai all of the processes of putrefaction – ‘the corruption of living bodies, decomposition, dissolution, the odor of corpses’ and ‘in general the transition of the living into the state of death’ – constitute the epitome of disgust. Indeed, Kolnai argues that many other things which elicit disgust can ultimately trace the root of their revulsion back to the liminal state of ‘life in death’.³⁶ He identifies disgust with life and vitality in the midst of death – for example, maggots writhing in a decomposing body, suffusing the cadaver with a ghastly post-mortem animation.

Colin McGinn’s recent ‘impure philosophy’ of disgust similarly claims putrescence as disgust’s master-trope, following Kolnai and extending his formulation into metaphysical territory. McGinn suggests that disgust always ‘proceeds from an oxymoron, a kind of collision or clash of categories’ – most saliently from ‘the friction between two of the categories most central to our conceptual scheme as self-conscious animals’, namely ‘Life and Death’. As he argues:

When these resounding categories refuse to stay separate, but merge together, disgust floods in… We fear and shun death and we embrace and celebrate life, but when the two come together, or are hard to tell apart, our reaction is to turn away in disgust – as if we wish to remain ignorant of the fact of interpenetration. We feel positive about the life that throbs even within putrefying flesh, but the heavy weight of negative affect concerning death robs that positive feeling of its usual value: we are torn, conflicted, confused… the astonishing force of life impresses us, but the terrible inevitability of death dampens and depresses. Putrefaction, as disgust paradigm, transparently combines both: the vital and the nullifying.³⁷

The ‘death-in-life’ theory synthesises several previously unsatisfactory accounts of disgust and is ‘closely bound up with ideas of consciousness and its annihilation’. Disgust is thus a pre-eminently ‘metaphysical emotion, spanning the divide between (roughly) mind and matter’. Our stubborn materiality, the brute fact of our bodily functions, exists in tension with our consciousness and our aspirations for transcendence. Because we are ‘both clean and unclean, superlative and sordid’, this insoluble union of body and spirit generates a kind of metaphysical and aesthetic shock – a constant surprise that our consciousness is tied so intimately to our decaying, mortal, animal bodies. As McGinn eloquently puts it: ‘consciousness appears to us as a non-disgusting zone of reality, but then we discover that we are also enmeshed in another zone consisting of gross biological material’.³⁸ While McGinn’s quarrel here is primarily with Descartes rather than Kant, his argument could also be applied to the sort of ‘two-world metaphysics’ that Grant identifies Schelling as challenging, a metaphysics which seeks to split ‘organic from “anorganic” nature’ and which divides the thinking subject from the world, and ideas from nature.³⁹

Poe’s horror holds the potential to achieve a representation of the Absolute, apprehended not as a spiritually uplifting totality as it might have been envisioned by the Boston transcendentalists but rather in a putrid, dark Romantic form as an unstable, oozing unity and contradiction, depicting the merging of subject and world through figures like ‘Morella’ and ‘Ligeia’. Rather than sublime fear or terror – the affect more often associated with horror fiction and the gothic generally – Poe’s fiction cultivates a form of perverse affect that aestheticises disgust, calling upon its uniquely visceral metaphysical insights.

The metaphysics of death-in-life in ‘Morella’

In Poe’s stories of the marriage group, such as ‘Morella’ and ‘Ligeia’, the Absolute is represented through an inversion of what Bram Dijkstra calls ‘the consumptive sublime’, an aestheticisation of the sickly woman as holy, pure and saint-like.⁴⁰ Poe’s tales of unhappy and disease-ravaged marriage foreground conflicting states of being, obsessing over the liminal moment between life and death or death infecting life through scenes of decay, death, revivification and reincarnation. In ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, Poe insists that death is the ‘most melancholy’ of the various ‘melancholy topics’ universal to humanity and claims that death is at its most poetical ‘when it most closely allies itself to Beauty’. For Poe, ‘the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world’.⁴¹ In several of Poe’s best known stories, diseased women wither and die, sometimes to return from the grave or, in their death throes, to metamorphose into some new, sensually malignant form. All of these stories invite us to witness the dissolution of a whole host of binary oppositions, oppositions that structured many nineteenth-century assumptions about the fundamental nature of the world: spirit and matter, life and death, and, most significantly for a Schellingian reading, the thinking subject and the non-human, mind- independent world. In these texts the normally sacrosanct borders between things become amorphous; categories break down, seemingly immaterial spirits are grotesquely materialised, identities merge and overlap, and decaying bodies become repulsively lively. All this dissolution and decay, this collapse of hitherto stable structures, resonates with a decomposing cosmos, becoming, in its dissolution, an undifferentiated totality. What seem macabre snuff tales about vampires and revenant-brides thus accrue metaphysical significance, foreshadowing a final state of being in which all seeming differences are subsumed by divine oneness, an eschatology difficult to keep fully in view.

‘Morella’ tells the story of Morella, a scholarly woman much dedicated to the study of German philosophers, who acquires a ‘crimson spot’ – suggesting consumption – and eventually dies in childbirth.⁴² The daughter of Morella and the nameless narrator begins to mature, acquiring an ever more apparent resemblance to her mother till eventually the uncanny similitude between the two becomes a source of horror. The girl’s father has curiously refrained from naming his daughter, and when prompted by a priest at her baptism he names her ‘Morella’, beseeching the reader:

What demon urged me to breathe the sound, which in its very recollection was wont to make ebb the purple blood in torrents from the temples to the heart… what fiend spoke from the recesses of my soul, when amid those dim aisles, and in the silence of the night, I whispered within the ears of the holy man the syllables – Morella? (p. 173)

The story ends with the daughter calling out ‘I am here!’ as she falls upon her mother’s tomb and expires. When her father opens the crypt to bury his daughter, he finds that his wife’s body has disappeared. ‘Morella’ is a ghost story, the spirit of a dead woman returning from the grave to haunt her beloved, but the spirit of Morella is not a disembodied phantom of a more conventional gothic type: rather she is too embodied, her presences materialising and so fusing with, subsuming, and finally replacing the body of her daughter. I want to look closely at Morella’s materialising spirit to tease out the relationship between the affective qualities her transformation arouses and, following Korsmeyer’s theory of aesthetic cognition and McGinn’s conception of disgust, the Schellingian metaphysics such affects might cognise.

‘Morella’ contains one of the few direct references to Schelling in all of Poe’s fiction: he is mentioned in the same sentence as Fichtean ‘wild Pantheism’, as well as Pythagoras, but his ‘doctrines of Identity’ are afforded particular primacy (p. 170). Texts like ‘Morella’ utilise putrescent undead characters to collapse not only a Cartesian dualism of body and spirit, but also the kind of two-world metaphysics that neatly separate the transcendental subject from the non-human world. As Schelling puts it in System of Transcendental Idealism: ‘one cannot say of the self that it exists… precisely because it is being-itself’,⁴³ a part of the Absolute that has become aware of itself through what Poe, in ‘Morella’, calls the ‘principium individuationis’ (p. 170). Morella’s undead liminality undercuts dualism or the integrity of a transcendental subject, but in Poe’s writing this leads us not simply to mechanistic materialism but rather towards something very much like the Absolute: a universal continuum both ideal and real that courses throughout all of nature and unifies the thinking subject and nature, the physical world.

Poe emphasises the horror of Morella’s wasting illness by calling attention to her prematurely decomposing flesh, noting the way that ‘the blue veins upon the pale forehead became prominent’, and to her sinister eyes, exciting in the narrator ‘the giddiness of one who gazes downward into some dreary and unfathomable abyss’ (p. 171). When Morella’s spirit possesses her own daughter, transforming the girl’s body into that of Morella, once again the focus is on the ‘hues of death’, on Morella’s ‘glassy eyes’ turning ‘from the earth to heaven’ (p. 173). Morella’s very name, attached like a parasite to her daughter as ‘a worm that would not die’, represents ‘the memory of the buried dead’ (p. 173). As the ‘shadows of similitude’ grow steadily ‘more full, and more definite, and more perplexing, and more hideously terrible in their aspect’ (p. 171), Morella’s daughter becomes an uncanny figure of the living dead, of death infecting life. Her final death throes and transformation into her cadaverous mother conjures a kind of apocalyptic vision in the narrator’s mind: ‘I kept no reckoning of time or place, and the stars of my fate faded from heaven, and therefore the earth grew dark, and its figures passed by me like flitting shadows, and among them all I beheld only – Morella’ (p. 173). It is as if the strange sickness of Morella threatened to spill from her body and infect the world.

This imagery of spreading darkness, creeping malignity, grave worms and the lure of the abyss stand in contrast to conventional nineteenth- century representations of the consumptive female body, portraying it as heavenly and beautiful, a mask of spiritual purity disguising the physical corruption of death-in-life. It is no coincidence that Poe’s female characters frequently suffer from consumption. Elaine Showalter argues that the consumptive female body constituted a paradigm of ‘wasting beauty’, in which the consumptive woman ‘was spiritualized, incorporeal, and pure’.⁴⁴ Elizabeth Bronfen similarly contends that in post-Enlightenment patriarchy, aesthetic representations of dead women allowed the masculine, rational subject to confront and conquer death: ‘even as we are forced to acknowledge the ubiquitous presence of death in life, our belief in our own immortality is confirmed’. Aestheticised representations of dead women thus constitute an ‘opium-induced, wish-fulfilling dream representation’ that ‘[soothes] the mourner about his own fear of mortality’.⁴⁵ For Bronfen, the abundance of art depicting dead women in the nineteenth century not only re-inscribes patriarchal constructions of female alterity, it forms part of a delusional, anthropocentric longing for triumph over death, decay and loss of all kinds.

Rather than ameliorating anxieties about death by depicting the female corpse as holy and beautiful, however, Poe assails the reader with repulsive representations of bodily decay and aberrant death-in-life. By refusing to efface the disgusting realities of decomposition and redoubling this revulsion through the figure Morella, Poe undermines discursive constructions of the female corpses as celestially pure that elsewhere reified notions of masculine power and allowed for fantasies of immortality and control over death and entropy. In place of the misogynist idealisation of the consumptive woman predominant in the nineteenth century, the fixation in ‘Morella’ on death-in-life and disgust reorients the text towards a metaphysics of the Absolute.

The narrator writes of the ‘perfect identity’ between mother and daughter, but with a shudder at the reflection of death and horror, ‘the melancholy of the dead’ in her normally ‘holy, and mild, and eloquent face’ (p. 171) – rather than being purified and beautiful in her illness, her beauty and holiness are profaned. Just as Schelling’s Absolute blurs together subjects and objects into a single, monist totality, and just as the cosmos Poe describes in Eureka is ultimately but one quasi-Spinozist divine being, so do matter and spirit blur in ‘Morella’ as death infects life, the terrifyingly precocious development of Morella’s daughter’s ‘mental being’ mirrored by strange, monstrous growth, ‘a rapid increase in bodily size’ (p. 171). The intermingling of the physical and the mental in the girl’s transformation brings about a reaction first of ‘agonising anxiety’ (p. 171) and later ‘consuming thought and horror’ (p. 173) in Poe’s narrator, a horror linked both to the consumptive disease that wracks his nameless child’s body and at the transformation, associated with the ‘mystical writings’ (p. 170) of figures like Schelling, which she undergoes.

Instead of the idealised, feminine paragon of purity and ‘sublime tubercular emaciation’⁴⁶ to be expected in a sentimental scene of death and mourning, Morella bursts from the tissues of her daughter in a perversely reversed birth with a disgusting array of physical signs and symptoms, repulsively materialised as a force of decay. Her features are ‘convulsed’ by a ‘fiend’ (p. 171) such that the narrator’s ‘pure affection’ is ‘darkened, and gloom, and horror, and grief, swept over in clouds’, leaving his senses ‘appalled’ and his thoughts ‘aghast’ (p. 170). In foregrounding the revolting horror of death-in-life and presenting Morella not as the pale, suffering saint so often the subject of artistic representation but as an entropic vampire cannibalising her own daughter in disgustingly spectacular terms, Poe’s story cuts against the prevailing consumptive aesthetics that made sickliness and feminine sacrifice virtues. He disguised the decay of the wasting female body to sustain a patriarchal fantasy of control and immortality, a fantasy predicated on binary structures of masculine and feminine, body and spirit, and physical and mental, and which thus depends on a Kantian two-worlds metaphysics structured around fundamental divisions between the subject and nature.

‘Morella’ offers a kind of nauseating gyration of the heel of the sort Poe imagines in Eureka, mother and daughter literally blurring together as the story whirls towards its vertiginous conclusion. It is exactly in such amalgamations that Schelling himself claims that art can reveal the Absolute, since for Schelling, art can represent the Absolute in a way that philosophy, ultimately, cannot. Schelling states that the essential nature of all art ‘is the representation of the absolute’ – all art, to one degree or another, serves as ‘a reflex of the infinite’. Or, as he puts it in System of Transcendental Idealism:

It is self-evident that art is at once the only true and eternal organ and document of philosophy, which ever and again continues to speak to us of what philosophy cannot depict in external form, namely the unconscious element in acting and producing, and its original identity with the conscious. Art is paramount to the philosopher, precisely because it opens to him, as it were, the holy of holies, where burns in eternal and original unity, as if in a single flame, that which in nature and history is rent asunder, and in life and action, no less than in thought, must forever fly apart. The view of nature, which the philosopher frames artificially, is for art the original and natural one. What we speak of as nature is a poem lying pent in a mysterious and wonderful script.⁴⁷

For Schelling, then, art unveils the original unity of all things, the Absolute union of the subject and the objective world: ‘the ultimate ground of all harmony between subjective and objective could be exhibited in its original identity only through intellectual intuition; and it is precisely this ground which, by means of the work of art, has brought forth entirely from the subjective, and rendered wholly objective’.⁴⁸ Art, for Schelling, does precisely what the speculative realists aim to do – overcome the correlationist prohibition of thinking the Absolute.

Morella’s consumption and reintegration of her own daughter mirrors the ouroboros-like cyclicity of Poe’s quasi-Germanic cosmos, the originator of things eventually devouring its progeny. As Korsmeyer suggests, part of disgust’s cognitive power is its insistence on the uneasy truth that ‘our corporeal selves will suffer disintegration and putrefaction’.⁴⁹ While Morella’s triumphant will might at first seem to affirm either a subjective idealism closer to Fichte than Schelling, or an entirely dualist universe in which the spirit lives on wholly independent of the flesh, her persistently disgusting corporeality points rather to the collision and dissolution of opposites, the instability of binaries in the face of category crisis and the collapse of beings, flesh and spirit into a single, awful unity. Morella refuses the possibility of what McGinn calls the ‘charmed sphere’ of the self that we try to preserve from the ‘tincture of disgust’.⁵⁰ Confronted with the disgusting spectacle of Morella’s metamorphosis, such immaterial purity is foreclosed.

This is not to suggest that disgust in ‘Morella’ transparently leads us to the true state of things while eliding all of discourse: disgust, as any emotion, cannot be neatly disentangled from social contexts, and is shaped by culture as well as shaping it. Doubtless some of the disgust associated with Morella’s body springs from a misogynist abjection of the female body, an association especially strengthened by the links between disease and reproduction in the text. Indeed, some critics have read ‘Morella’ and other texts of the ‘marriage group’ as stories of primal masculine envy, interpreting the mysterious illnesses of Poe’s undead brides as pregnancy. Yet insofar as disgust is predicated on boundaries under threat of collapse, even as the emotion is called on to police such borders it betrays their ultimate arbitrariness and illusoriness, their permeability. The disgust Morella’s categorically confusing, undead body inspires owes some of its loathsome power to patriarchal constructions of the female reproductive body as unclean, but the very anxiety underlying this construction points to its artifice while betraying a glimmer of the Absolute throbbing beneath the story’s discursive skin.

‘Ligeia’, affect and the Absolute

‘Ligeia’ repeats many of the same concepts and images as ‘Morella’ at greater length and with greater complexity. Both of Poe’s diseased, vampiric women have bodies in transformation, occupying multiple states simultaneously: they are what Noël Carroll, in his discussion of monsters as figures of category confusion or crisis, would call fusion figures: ‘single figures in whom distinct and often clashing types of elements are superimposed or condensed, resulting in entities that are impure and repulsive’.⁵¹ Like ‘Morella’, the story concerns the death and return of its eponymous character. Ligeia, the scholarly wife of the tale’s unnamed narrator, contracts a wasting illness, writes a strange poem, ‘The Conqueror Worm’ and, cryptically quoting Joseph Glanvill, pronounces the words ‘Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will’, before finally succumbing to the ravages of the disease.⁵² The narrator remarries a woman named Rowena, who also contracts a horrific sickness. In the paroxysms of her death throes Rowena undergoes a bizarre transformation, metamorphosing from ‘the fair-haired, the blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine’ (p. 134) into the black-eyed, raven-haired Ligeia.

While lacking explicit reference to Schelling, ‘Ligeia’ exhibits the same fascination with questions of matter and spirit, body and mind, and subject and nature as ‘Morella’. From the outset of the story, the narrator persistently physicalises Ligeia’s intellect while simultaneously describing her bodily features in spiritual terms. Ligeia’s learning is ‘immense’ and her metaphysical acquisitions ‘gigantic’ (p. 129). She possesses ‘the radiance of an opium-dream’, and her mouth is described as the ‘triumph of all things heavenly’, along with ‘the magnificent turn of the short upper lip – the soft, voluptuous slumber of the under – the dimples which sported, and the colour which spoke – the teeth glancing back, with a brilliance almost startling, every ray of the holy light which fell upon them serene and placid’ (p. 128). After describing Ligeia’s mouth the narrator then moves on to her chin, observing its ‘fullness and… spirituality’ before finally arriving at her eyes, lavishing an entire paragraph on her ‘divine orbs’ (p. 128). Even in these early stages of the story, Poe intermingles the spiritual and the material, hinting at the more horrific loss of distinction to come.

As the story progresses, Ligeia’s amorphousness becomes another amorphous figure of death-in-life, a malignantly corporeal ghost whose possession of Rowena collapses the matter-spirit distinction. The parasitic Ligeia becomes one with Rowena, body and mind melting together in a Schellingian dissolution into Absolute unity. Ligeia’s incorporeal soul takes on hideously material form, undermining substance dualism and producing a ‘tumult unappeasable’ in the mind of the narrator: not only do two people fuse into one, undermining the idea of a coherent, individualised subject, Ligeia casts off ‘the fetters of death’ to become an enshrouded ‘thing’, performing a ‘hideous drama of revivification’ filled with ‘unspeakable horrors’ (p. 134). So horrific and yet repetitious are the changes undergone by Rowena’s corpse as it incubates its monstrously material parasite that Poe’s narrator ultimately elides the details in order to ‘hurry to a conclusion’ (p. 134), leaving segments of the text literally unspeakable and lending Ligeia’s strange performance a hysterical, macabre element of farce, mocking the normally sacrosanct border of death.

Though silent throughout the story, Ligeia achieves a kind of agency by its end. By violating the fair-haired, angelically submissive Lady Rowena, Ligeia exhibits a will to live and a ‘passionate… idolatrous love’ (p. 131) that reveals itself as an all-consuming and irrepressible force, the very ‘extremity of horror’ (p. 134). While this horror depends in part on a patriarchal system that imagines femininity and female desire as Other and even inhuman, the contaminating quality of Ligeia’s manifestation hints at the primordial, metamorphic unity Poe suggests in Eureka that the cosmos will disintegrate into, a unity in which all individuality, all distinctions, are lost. Once again, our glimpse of this unity is provided through the vexed, putrefying body of Ligeia and later Rowena through a panoply of symptoms – first of disease, then of Ligeia’s demoniac possession of her husband’s new bride.

‘Ligeia’ does more than simply reiterate the same ideas as ‘Morella’. First, the story is longer, allowing Poe to better develop a sense of suspense and dizzying downward progression, what – to utilise terms put forth by Kelly Hurley – could be termed an ‘entropic’ plot. For Hurley ‘entropic plotting – which bears rough similarities to tragic plotting’ concerns the breakdown of complexity and the undoing of forward-moving concepts of progress, a narrative unravelling linked to sensations of nausea.⁵³ ‘Ligeia’ is structured around a series of breakdowns and resuscitations, the narrator obsessively charting the decay first of Ligeia and then of Rowena, noting with increasing density and intensity of description every shrivelling or tremor of the lips and each paling or flush of the cheeks with mounting disgust. He observes with nauseated fascination as ‘a repulsive clamminess and coldness overspread rapidly the surface of [Rowena’s] body’ (p. 134), death-in-life made flesh as Ligeia’s vampiric spirit materialises. The story devolves into a series of symptoms, shudders and paroxysms intermingling with morbidly detailed descriptions of body parts and subtle changes and fluctuations, breaking into a kind of narrative hysteria. In this way, Poe’s narrative strategy mirrors the content of ‘Ligeia’, conventional narration decaying into indifferentiation in a giddy onrush towards the churning ontological chaos of the Absolute.

‘Ligeia’ also includes representations of aesthetic objects – the elaborately refurbished abbey the narrator purchases following Ligeia’s death, and the embedded poem ‘The Conqueror Worm’, originally published independently by Poe in Graham’s Magazine in 1843 but later added to the text of ‘Ligeia’ in 1845. The poem, which in the story is penned by Ligeia herself and constitutes the only words of her own that we read, wildly raves of ‘vast formless things’ acting as puppeteers of mimes performing a play on stage set to ‘the music of the spheres’, and above all of ‘a blood-red thing’ writhing forth to devour the players. At the poem’s end the play is described as a ‘tragedy, “Man”’, and the Conqueror Worm deemed its only hero (p. 130). Elena Anastasaki has recently argued that while embedded poems like the one used in ‘Ligeia’ might seem to threaten the much vaunted unity of effect so prized by Poe, in fact ‘The Conqueror Worm’ is invested with a crucial aesthetic and narrative significance. She points out that the poem allows Poe to communicate to the reader more than prose can accommodate, noting that poetry ‘is presented as conveying a higher form of Truth, one that bypasses both the unreliability of the narrator and the limitations of the rationality of prose’.⁵⁴ In this sense the relationship between ‘The Conqueror Worm’ and ‘Ligeia’ mimics the relationship between philosophy and art described by Schelling.

‘The Conqueror Worm’ begins when the narrator, his brain reeling from the ‘wild meaning’ of Ligeia’s words (p. 129), claims himself unable to continue his account, insisting that he has ‘no utterance capable of expressing’ Ligeia’s strange suggestions (p. 130): we have approached a limit of thought and articulation, a limit that ‘The Conqueror Worm’ is about to transgress. The poem is remote from the narrative and even from linear time; it turns our mind to the scale of the universe, its beginning and ending, and our place within it. The ‘vast, formless things’ that lurk behind the shifting scenery suggest a hidden world beyond ordinary comprehension, obfuscated from our sight, which the irruption of the worm unveils. In addition to foreshadowing Ligeia’s now imminent death and eventual revivification, the poem’s deployment of disgust through the figure of the gore-smeared, vermin-fanged worm, a revolting ‘thing’ that transforms the stage curtain into ‘a funeral pall’ that ‘comes down with the rush of a storm’ (p. 130), serves as another instance of death infecting life, of inevitable putrefaction and the triumph of indifferentiation. The worm, ‘a crawling shape’ which intrudes into the ‘motley drama’ and transforms it into a tragedy ‘of Madness’, ‘Sin’ and ‘Horror, the soul of the plot’ (p. 130), bursts into the angelic theatre of the poem’s beginning, a symbol of victorious decay.

In this sense the poem functions as a microcosmic example of Schellingian tragedy. Schelling singles out tragic drama as particularly well suited to approach the Absolute, for tragedy produces a kind of sublime experience in which collisions between freedom (the power of the subject) and fate (the power of nature, the world-without-us) are dramatised. For Schelling, ‘the view of the universe as chaos… is the basic view of the sublime to the extent that within it everything is comprehended as unity in Absolute identity’. Schelling writes that the mythology revealed by tragedy, and some forms of poetry, ‘is nothing other than the universe in its higher manifestation, in its absolute form, the true universe in itself, image or symbol of life and of wondrous chaos in the divine imagination’.⁵⁵ Like a profane but all-powerful divine being, the worm disrupts the world of appearances and presentation, the phenomenal world, and, with totalising power, consumes the ‘mimes’ who cavort on the stage. After hearing the poem recited aloud, Ligeia recoils in horror, wondering whether human beings are ‘not part and parcel in [God]’ and pondering ‘the mysteries of the will’ (p. 130), perceiving, in a flash of poetic insight imbued with horror and revulsion, a pantheistic oneness encompassing all things.

Thacker notes that usually when we think of the world, we think of it as the ‘world-for-us’, an anthropocentric daydream shaped by discourse: ‘this is the world that we, as human beings, interpret and give meaning to, the world that we relate to or feel alienated from’. The world frequently ‘resists, or ignores our attempts to mold it into the world-for-us’, because ultimately its seeming for-us-ness is illusory. The world exists ‘in some inaccessible, already-given state’, the ‘world-in-itself’, seemingly beyond human thinking: ‘the moment we think it an attempt to act on it, it ceases to be the world-in-itself and becomes the world-for-us’.⁵⁶ ‘Morella’ and ‘Ligeia’ both begin by presenting what looks like a version of the world-for-us: a conventional, sentimental narrative of the death and mourning of a woman, exactly the kind of consolatory representation, common in the nineteenth century, through which masculinist fantasies of conquering death and the other organic processes of nature are enacted. But instead of this familiar story, Poe’s tales of undead brides erupt into the ontic horror of cosmic dissolution. Rather than gazing upon a mask of beauty, placed like a funereal shroud over the face of the deceased, Poe’s stories stare unflinchingly into the rotting visage of death-in-life and the monstrous unification of subject and world it signifies. In the next section, I continue my investigation of the rotting face beneath the shroud in Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’.

Decay, disgust and indifferentiation in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’

‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ begins as the unnamed narrator comes to visit one of his old ‘intimate associates’, Roderick Usher, responding to a letter in which Roderick, complaining of ‘acute bodily illness’ and ‘mental disorder’ requests his old friend’s presence.⁵⁷ Upon arriving, the narrator finds Roderick ‘terribly altered’ (p. 82) and also catches a glimpse of his twin sister, Madeline, who also suffers from a disease that has ‘long baffled the skill of her physicians’ (p. 83). The narrator passes some time with Roderick, viewing his paintings and listening to his ‘fervid’ musical compositions with suggestions of ‘mystic’ inner meaning, including the strange, horrible ballad ‘The Haunted Palace’ (p. 84), which gives rise to thoughts of ‘the kingdom of inorganization’ and the sentience of stones and ‘of all vegetable things’ (p. 85). The latter parts of the tale consist of Madeline’s seeming death, possibly premature entombment and revivification or return. After her burial, Madeline seems to stir from the grave – or, perhaps, to simply wake from her cataleptic state. She rushes forth from her tomb and clasps her brother in a monstrous embrace, till both fall to the floor, dead. The narrator rushes from the house only to witness its collapse into the black waters of the tarn that already seemed to contain the house, holding the gloomy mansion in its reflection.

Along with several other of Poe’s stories, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ has cemented the idea of Poe as an author of psychological horror, and, indeed, the story is full of uncanny doubles, Freudian suggestions, the possibility of incest and homoeroticism, and a dream-like atmosphere rich with possible symbols for the unconscious or the fractured psyche. Without denying or discarding such interpretations, I read the story in ontological terms rather than purely psychological ones. Like ‘Ligeia’ and ‘Morella’, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ presents us with a kind of possession narrative, but here it is unclear who (or what) is possessing whom – is the house reflecting and exteriorising the madness of Roderick and his sister, or is it actually causing their decline, as the story sometimes hints? The tale continuously blurs the boundaries between characters and setting, troubling conceptions of selfhood, agency and humanness. The omnipresent imagery of decomposition in the story not only suggests the mental breakdown of Roderick and possibly the narrator, it foreshadows the breakdown of all distinctions and the subsumption of everything into ‘the deep and dank tarn’ (p. 89), both Ushers and their house dissolving back into a putrescent totality in which all distinctions are lost.

‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is saturated with the imagery of decay. The house and surrounding landscape inspire in the narrator a nauseous ‘sickening of the heart’ (p. 81). When the narrator approaches the decrepit Usher mansion, whose grotesquery is compounded by architectural variegation and the depredations of organic growths, an excess of life, we are told that:

Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine, tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old woodwork which has rotted for years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. (p. 82)

Poe’s language here stresses the house’s incoherence, its contradictoriness. It is both incredibly old and yet without extreme dilapidation; its individual stones are crumbling and its woodwork rotting, but none of it has fallen. Even the fungi – already a categorically confused and confusing force of decay, caught between animal and plant, parasitically infesting host organisms – also resemble arachnid cobwebs, blurring the line between seemingly passive, non-sentient matter and vermin. The fungi, in their rhizomatic profusion and penetration of the house, suggest a series of connections and couplings between the house and its grounds, blurring the boundaries between natural and artificial as they hasten the house’s decomposition. It is not that the house, in its contradictoriness and defiance of schema and category, is an ‘anomaly’ per se. Rather, the house suggests that multiplicity and difference always form part of a greater totality beneath the surface, that our distinctions themselves are flawed or superficial. While the ‘barely perceptible fissure’ that runs along the wall of the house until it becomes ‘lost in the sullen waters of the tarn’ (p. 82) foreshadows the mansion’s collapse, I also want to read it as a physical representation of the Kantian split between subject and object which the collapse undoes.

The house is a kind of loathsome amalgam. H. P. Lovecraft wrote that ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ ‘hints shudderingly of obscure life in inorganic things’, most prominently through ‘an abnormally linked trinity of entities at the end of a long and isolated family history – a brother, his twin sister, and their incredibly ancient house all sharing a single soul and meeting one common dissolution at the same moment’.⁵⁸ It is this abnormal and revolting linkage between organic and inorganic components that leads us towards indifferentiation, a monist ontology in which the line between living beings and non-living things is smudged, breathing body and wasting corpse and decaying house melding in a cadaverous Absolute. The house’s mismatched inorganic components are host to organic ones, the actors of decay and the house itself seems horribly like a decomposing body, with ‘vacant eye-like windows’ suggesting the empty sockets of a skull (p. 81). It seems of a piece with the ‘ghastly tree-stems’ and ‘few white trunks of decayed trees’ which protrude from the grounds like the bony fragments of a half-exhumed skeleton and conspire alongside the decaying house to produce ‘an utter depression of soul’ most comparable to ‘the hideous dropping off of the veil’ (p. 81), the liminal, disgust-inducing moment between life and death inviting metaphysical awareness of the fragility of consciousness, its rootedness in the physical world. Catalysed by the onset of decomposition, house, trees, landscape, fungi and water run into one another to form an affective assemblage exerting power over the narrator.

The Ushers themselves form part of this decaying assemblage as well. In their own diseased decline, the Ushers mirror the decomposition of their hereditary mansion, house reflecting family and vice versa: the Ushers bear the same monstrous decrepitude as their estate, while the house resembles their emaciated features. As the narrator states, the original title of the estate has merged with the Usher family name, such that ‘the quaint and equivocal appellation of the “House of Usher”… seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion’ (p. 82). This slippage of language between house and family is reiterated in the description of the Ushers. The narrator notes Roderick Usher’s ‘cadaverousness of complexion’, his ‘thin and very pallid’ lips and his hair’s ‘weblike softness’ (p. 82) – a softness with a texture like ‘wild gossamer’ recalling the ‘web-work’ of fungi hanging over the house’s eaves – as well as a ‘ghastly pallor of the skin’ and ‘emaciated fingers’ (p. 83). As with the house, Usher is in a state of decay: ‘surely, man had never been so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher!’ (p. 82). Roderick’s disease is specifically defined in terms of affect and the tyranny of things over the human body and mind. His description brings to mind a living corpse, already wasting away, and thus invites particularly powerful disgust. Again, as McGinn claims, the collision between life and death underlies much if not all of what we consider disgusting: ‘disgust occupies a borderline space, a region of uncertainty and ambivalence, where life and death meet and merge’. Roderick, with his thinness and pallor, his fungous-cobweb hair like a post-mortem growth, his ‘cadaverousness’ and wasting illness, exemplifies this borderline space. If, as McGinn claims, ‘the proper object of disgust is really a process’ – specifically ‘the process of putrefaction’ – then the slow process of Roderick’s decline can be understood as the quintessence of the disgusting.⁵⁹ As in Schelling’s much vaunted tragedy, we see a ‘representation of unity that is marked… by strife, contradiction, and incompleteness’, here represented through the repulsive processes of putrefaction invading the living body of Roderick Usher.⁶⁰

Like her sibling, Lady Madeline Usher is a figure of decomposition and living death, a doppelgänger of her brother wracked with ‘a settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequently through transient affections of a partially cataleptical character’ (p. 83). Even more so than Roderick she is marked as an embodiment of death-in-life: like the diseased, undead brides of ‘Morella’ and ‘Ligeia’ she is a revenant, literally returning from the grave (where she may well have been prematurely buried). But even before she is interred she is presented in a ‘region of horror’ and inspires a mixture of awe and revulsion (p. 86). Poe writes of ‘the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face’ and of a ‘suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death’ (p. 86), both suggesting a blurring of life and death, the ‘process of transition… where the two poles of the transition are life and death’ that McGinn stresses as the essential elicitor of disgust. The signs of life lingering around Madeline suggest what McGinn would call ‘a moment of deep metaphysical transition’ as life and death are ‘paradoxically unified’ such that it seems as if ‘the consciously living is still hovering around the organically dead’.⁶¹ The state of uncertainty clouding Madeline’s actual decease only compounds this moment of horror and disgust. Her ‘striking similitude’ (p. 86) to her brother is emphasised by the narrator; house, brother and sister thus emerge as part of putrid troika, an amalgam that further includes the disease(s) afflicting the siblings and the aesthetic objects Roderick uses to soothe his condition. This similarity again points to the underlying unity of the house/House of Usher – their ‘shared soul’, to use Lovecraft’s term.⁶²

All of this interpenetration of the organic and the inorganic erodes boundaries between consciousness and world, calling the sanctity and stability of the human subject into question and replacing it with the amorphous ontology of the Absolute. Roderick himself seems to endorse a panpsychic ontology affording the non-human a peculiar agency, insisting on ‘the sentience of all vegetable things’ and arguing that the ‘grey stones of the home of his forefathers… in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around them’ and ‘above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of the arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn’ are evidence of the estate’s sentience, which possesses a ‘silent yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and which had made him… what he was’ (p. 85). The malign power of objects to affect the human subject extends to the collection of artworks that Roderick treasures; these are said to literally form ‘no small portion of the mental existence of the invalid’ (p. 85). We are told throughout the story that Roderick’s malady relates to a hypersensitivity to sensation: ‘he suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses’ (p. 83). Roderick cultivates peculiar aesthetic fascinations in order to soothe his frayed nerves, yet even these efforts cast a kind of ‘sulphurous lustre’ (p. 84) over everything, suggesting both a rancid smell and the fires of hell.

Roderick’s artistic fixations lead us back towards the entwinement of affect, metaphysics and horror, as if modelling the aesthetics of Poe’s horror fiction. The narrator’s aesthetic experiences with the artworks that Roderick adores emphasise the futility of action in the face of a mind imprisoned by the inevitability of entropy – ‘a mind from which darkness, as if an inherently positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom’ (p. 84). We are told that ‘if ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher’, his abstract paintings evoking ‘an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which [the narrator] had felt ever yet in the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuseli’ (p. 84). The metaphysical imagery here suggests a cosmos of endless gloom, while the strangely ‘positive’ darkness suggests a negation so utter it becomes corporeal. As Thacker writes in his consideration of the mysticism of darkness through philosophers ranging from Dionysus the Areopagite to Georges Bataille, ‘positive’ darkness – darkness not as an absence of light but as a presence of its own – can be understood as darkening the human, working ‘to undo the human by paradoxically revealing the shadows and nothingness at its core, to move not towards a renewed knowledge of the human, but towards something we can only call an unknowing of the human, or really, the unhuman’.⁶³ The text’s aesthetics of infernal gloom and decay couple with the nauseous erosion of boundaries between self and other, house and family.

Awe mingles with disgust in the most noteworthy of Roderick’s aesthetic obsessions, ‘The Haunted Palace’, which like ‘The Conqueror Worm’ of ‘Ligeia’ was published independently of the short story in which it is embedded. Jonathan Cook argues that the poem ‘provides a poetic abstract of the collapse of Usher’s mental and physical worlds’ and suggests that ‘The Haunted Palace’ invites a view of ‘the human body as a microcosmic view of the universe’.⁶⁴ The poem is a narrative of collapse – specifically, the collapse of consciousness. It stages a confrontation between the aesthetics of beauty and horror, between reification of the subject’s transcendental excellence exalting rationality and the monstrous Absolute. The imagery of the poem mirrors this confrontation, turning from bucolic and heavenly to necrotic and hellish. Beginning with a depiction of ‘the monarch Thought’s dominion’ as ‘a fair and stately palace’ (p. 84) surrounded by green valleys and protected by angels, the poem interrupts its Neoplatonic idyll with the presence of ‘evil things, in robes of sorrow’ assailing Thought’s estate, replacing the celestial figures glimpsed in its now ‘red-litten windows’ with ‘Vast forms that move fantastically/To a discordant melody’ (p. 85). The antagonists of thought are rendered as grotesque agents of decay and malignancy, forming a ‘hideous wrong’ that resembles ‘a rapid ghastly river’ (p. 85): homogenous and multitudinous, their incursion undermines the supremacy of the subject, suggesting a cosmic pessimism in which transcendence is refused and the inevitability of entropy is affirmed. Even the simile of the river suggests ontological fluidity while also bringing to mind the river Styx and thus the transition between life and death. ‘The Haunted Palace’ uses the trope of usurpation and the collapse of a kingdom to represent the supremacy of indifferentiation, a noetic abyss that swallows up any delusion of the human subject’s ascendency. In this sense the poem – like ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ as a whole – inverts the Kantian sublime, its glorification of the subject and its entrenchment of a two-worlds metaphysics, of the division between subject and world. And like ‘The Conqueror Worm’, the poem reveals something deeper than the rest of the (prose) story discloses: in this case ‘the tottering of [Usher’s] lofty reason upon her throne’ (p. 84), the fragility of the human mind as Usher flirts precipitously with madness and non-being. Any pretence of self-aggrandisement or transcendental mastery of the sort imagined by Kant is dashed to pieces by ‘The Haunted Palace’.