From the Guest Editor: The Legacy of Poe’s Graphicality in the Expanded Field

Abstract

In this special issue on graphicality for the Edgar Allan Poe Review, both long-established and more recent Poe scholars offer a provocative glance into the legacy of graphicality in the expanded field, especially in the disciplines of cinema/film studies, art history, religious studies, visual culture, and world literature. Coined by Poe in his 1846 essay on Sarah Margaret Fuller, “graphicality” persists today as an undefined term, though Poe seems to imply that it was meant to convey the idea that writers could create vivid, mental images through their expressive words. As one can imagine, this conceptualization of graphicality became part and parcel of Poe’s own handling of the symbiotic relationship that exists between texts and images, especially in his personal articulation of Gothic Romanticism. Graphicality also offered an indirect challenge to the word-image binary—or hierarchy—which argues that these terms be treated as two, independent entities, rather than a single, unified concept. By confronting the manner in which graphicality (as an interdisciplinary theory) has subsequently been utilized by writers, visual artists, historians, theologians, and filmmakers in the late nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, authors in this special issue effectively demonstrate how Poe’s graphicality continues to serve as a relevant, semiotic framework in the expanded field today.What is graphicality in the expanded field; or more specifically, how might we begin to conceive of graphicality beyond Poe studies? In her canonical 1979 essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” art historian Rosalind Krauss problematized modernist definitions of sculpture alongside US minimalist art and site-specific works, arguing that the former could not adequately explain the manifestation, or classification, of the latter. Instead, by breaking down binaries that (somewhat arbitrarily) exist between architecture/not-architecture, landscape/not-landscape, and sculpture/site-construction, Krauss sought to establish new categories for what “sculpture” was—and was not—in the 1950s and 1960s. In a similar manner, Poe’s notion of graphicality defies any clear-cut definition, for it is certainly more than a simplistic relationship between syntax and illustrative images. Rather, graphicality erodes the hegemony between the literary and visual arts by suggesting that each serve vital, yet complementary, roles in the imagination of the receptive reader/viewer.A number of the essays presented in this special issue draw on papers delivered at the 2018 “International Poe and Hawthorne Conference” in Kyoto, Japan, and the 2019 Association for Art History annual conference in Brighton, England. Through conversations with peers and colleagues at these respective symposia, authors in this volume—myself included—benefited from constructive feedback and were presented with new avenues of thought. Importantly, these forums allowed us to connect the common thread of graphicality across our multivalent research topics, which span the gamut of the humanities and capture an interesting cross-section of the expanded field.Building on Barbara Cantalupo’s groundbreaking 2014 book Poe and the Visual Arts, Amy Golahny’s essay investigates Poe’s interest in Italian Renaissance and Baroque paintings and sculptures, arguing that his references to European historical artworks served as an important impetus for the development of, as well as his personal musings for, graphicality in the visual arts. In reviewing Poe’s contemporaneous critiques of New York art exhibitions, she argues that Poe was not only familiar with specific works but was interested in drawing visual allusions to said objects, given that he regularly alluded to art in his stories to better illuminate the inner nature of his central characters, and to establish an appropriately opulent setting for their respective actions.In their essay titled “A man must laugh, or die,” Margarita Rigal-Aragón and Fernando González-Moreno analyze graphicality as a form of “translation”, or “visual comprehension” of Poe’s tales. By reexamining illustrated editions of Poe’s stories, they bring to light the often neglected comical, parodic, and ironical facets of Poe’s words. By focusing their attention on humorous “translations” offered by Ramón Calsina, Frederick Stuart Church, Gus Gofa, Gris Grimly, and Arthur Rackham, Rigal-Aragón and González-Moreno paint a rich tapestry of the ways in which these illustrators used their personal, caricature-like styles to better highlight and reflect the satirical nature of Poe’s literary works.In her essay on the “grotesque” graphicality of Poe’s “Berenice,” Ana Gonzalez-Rivas posits that such horror-writing attracted the attention of numerous visual artists throughout the past three centuries, ranging from famous nineteenth-century illustrators, like Odilon Redon, to contemporary comic-book artists, like Richard Corben. Across the plethora of illustrations for “Berenice,” Gonzalez-Rivas identifies two tropes for the central female character: the idealistic (which attempted to portray Berenice as a melancholic beauty) and the grotesque (which tended to display the hero as a lurid figure). Most striking is Gonzalez-Rivas’s ability to illustrate how comics and graphic novels reiterate the vibrancy of Poe’s graphicality into the expanded field of the twenty-first century.John Gruesser’s essay titled “Illustrating Poe’s Detection,” opens with the recognition that Poe held a long, yet never realized, desire to launch his own monthly, illustrated journal, in which images would have served as the highest order of art, but “only in obvious illustration of the text.” In turn, Gruesser argues that Poe’s detective stories—works like “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and “The Gold-Bug” (1843)—specifically appealed to an incredible array of artists, including Aubrey Beardsley, Harry Clarke, Felix Darley, J. Groman, Charles Raymond Macauley, and Fernando Xumetra Ragull. Through his exegeses of Poe’s words and their resultant illustrations, Gruesser not only explains why Poe’s detective stories have long fascinated visual artists, but identifies the specific aspects of Poe’s detection on which these illustrators focused, indicating how and why such images have evolved over the centuries.In a somewhat similar vein, my essay on Beardsley’s well-known (yet little explained) Poe images argues that these four drawings by the English illustrator are particularly unique in the pantheon of illustrations created for Poe’s works prior to 1894. Rather than seeking explicit grotesqueness or overwrought symbolism, as often explored by his contemporaries, Beardsley instead employed an implicit (rather than explicit) notion of dread, horror, and the macabre in order to highlight the very crux of Poe’s graphicality. By analyzing Poe’s ekphratic understanding of graphicality alongside a binary of interiority and exteriority (in both words and images), I seek to demonstrate how Beardsley’s four images were not meant to operate as “pure” illustrations, but rather, as images that carry latent anxieties already inherent to Poe’s stories, especially those that revolve around the themes of decay and speciesism.Turning away from the disciplines of art history and literary criticism, Devin P. Zuber’s essay expands the field by investigating Poe’s American Romanticism alongside Emanuel Swedenborg’s visionary theology. Zuber begins with the realization that Poe sprinkled occasional references to Swedenborg across his corpus—most prominently, the narrator in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) reads Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell (1758) with Roderick Usher—in order to tie Swedenborg’s supernaturalism to his use of gloomy atmospherics in his tales of horror. As such, Zuber utilizes Swedenborg’s “linguistic cosmology” as a point of entry into Poe’s own ekphrasis of graphicality. By “reading” Poe through Swedenborg’s hieroglyphic correspondences, Zuber postulates that both Poe and Swedenborg push visual representation in their respective works, so that the description of objects and things can function as a kind of semiotic language. This attempt for words to both signify and simultaneously be physical, sensuous things, was, in turn, enmeshed in larger nineteenth-century cultural dynamics of the secular and a re-enchantment of nature enabled by the aesthetic.In the most contemporary analysis of graphicality, Megan Hines engages Poe’s concept as a methodology for decoding meaning in Pierre Huyghe’s art film/performance piece titled A Journey That Wasn’t (2005). Based loosely on Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), A Journey That Wasn’t visually recounts Huyghe’s harrowing trip to the Antarctic in search of an albino penguin, only to culminate in the eponymous, wholly theatrical performance piece staged in New York City. Motivated by the melting of the polar icecaps, Huyghe adapted Poe’s tale of polar exploration for the era of climate change, but also to offer a conceptual foundation. In arguing that graphicality is a theory of “subjective looking,” Hines thus contends that Poe provided a platform from which Huyghe could build a critical stance on science as a highly aesthetic activity.Finally, in the Marginalia to this special issue, Birte Bruchmüller tackles an important, though often overlooked, illustration of Poe’s “The Raven” by the Swedish symbolist painter, illustrator, and novelist Tyra Kleen. Bruchmüller directs a macro-focus on graphicality into a micro-examination by investigating Poe’s concept alongside Kleen’s illustration titled Nevermore. Starting with the premise that Poe’s graphicality emanates from a combination of artistic mediums, or what Bruchmüller terms the “synthetic inter-medial,” she charts how media transgressions, fusions, and combinations were key to Kleen’s exploration of Poe’s text. In positing that graphicality might be read as a “new medium,” Bruchmüller cleverly shows how Kleen’s symbolist illustration embodies the potential to destabilize traditional text-image relations by proposing a coexistence of verbal and visual elements in a highly innovative and liberated process.The thoughtful studies presented by the contributors to this special issue make evident the fertile territory that exists in the liminal space between words and images and suggests, moreover, that perhaps such limited terminology (that is, what constitutes a “word” or an “image” in the mind, or on the page) might be equally generative for Poe scholars working within—or beyond—the purview of the literary and visual arts. By charting the legacy of graphicality in this volume, my hope is that readers will be inspired to engage with Poe’s theory in their own research, and in so doing, expand the field even further. It is clear that architectural studies, semiotics, and works by non-American/non-European artists that fall “outside” of the white-centric canon could all benefit from Poe’s novel conceptualization of the interplay between text and image. As with Hines’s investigation of Huyghe’s cinematic/performative work, or Gonzalez-Rivas’s insights into Corben’s comic-book illustrations, I am particularly interested in how twenty-first-century artists might begin to employ graphicality in their artistic practices, especially as a mode of synthetic inter-mediality, to quote Bruchmüller. In this current moment, which has witnessed the collapse of many academic silos to create a more universal challenge to the privileging of the status quo, I find Poe’s interdisciplinarity to be a wildly imaginative, optimistic motivator for future scholarship.