Horror Art: A review of The Great Illustrators of Edgar Allan Poe

Abstract

Horror ArtA review of The Great Illustrators of Edgar Allan Poe John A. Dern (bio) Magistrale, Tony, and Jessica Slayton. The Great Illustrators of Edgar Allan Poe. Anthem Press, 2021. 204 pp. $125.00. (hardcover) Early in their introduction to The Great Illustrators of Edgar Allan Poe, Tony Magistrale and Jessica Slayton observe how the tenor of Professor Magistrale's early American literature survey at the University of Vermont changes when the curriculum turns to the oftmorbid compositions of Edgar Allan Poe: "The level of enthusiasm among the students becomes charged…" (1). Poe tends to have this effect, not only on students, but also on those who illustrate his works, as The Great Illustrators makes clear. Magistrale and Slayton's text is an exploration of Poe-inspired illustrations from the nineteenth century into the postmodern era. As an exploration, the book is a work of depth, not breadth, which Magistrale and Slayton acknowledge (1). In this sense, it is unlike Burton Pollin's Images of Poe's Works: A Comprehensive Descriptive Catalogue of Illustrations (Greenwood Press, 1989). In a prefatory entry to the latter entitled "Using the Catalogue, Filmography, and Indexes," Pollin describes "The Catalogue" portion of his text as "an extensive descriptive bibliography of printed images and illustrations inspired by works of Poe" (xix). The Great Illustrators, on the other hand, tackles what the introduction calls "a paucity of interpretive scholarship that actually explores in any detail the historical sweep of Poe illustrations and their importance" (3). The introduction goes on to promise "close [End Page 99] analyses" of particular Poe illustrators and selections of their work in historical and intertextual contexts, and that is precisely what the book delivers (3). Pollin, in his own introduction, notes that an awareness of the "changing perspective on Poe's rather limited oeuvre" arises from the "broad survey of the illustrations" that he provides in that section of Images of Poe's Works (1). Though their own enquiry is more targeted, Magistrale and Slayton bring an abundance of interpretive depth to the "changing perspective" of Poe's works as they analyze select illustrators' renderings of Poe over the course of a century and a half, from the first chapter, "The French Poe," to the last, "Postmodern Poe." The work of Jacques Derrida provides the paradigm for The Great Illustrators. Approaching illustrations of Poe's works via ekphrasis, Magistrale and Slayton treat Poe's texts as ergons and illustrators' works as parergons: "Derrida states that—without fail and without intention—the ergon is inherently incomplete, thus creating space for the parergon to attach itself" (4). Throughout The Great Illustrators, Magistrale and Slayton reveal again and again how Poe's illustrators take full advantage of the interpretive latitude that Poe's works afford, their own creations attaching themselves to individual Poe poems and stories as complementary narratives. In "The French Poe," the first artist treated—and certainly one of the first to make one of Poe's works his own—is Édouard Manet, whose 1875 illustrations of Poe's "The Raven," as Magistrale and Slayton point out, depict a much more composed narrator than readers of that poem might expect (17). In fact, in contrast to more traditional Gothic approaches to "The Raven," Manet provides an urban setting for the poem, his narrator thus taking on the role of flâneur, à la Charles Baudelaire: "Manet's illustrations offer us a flâneur who subsists in a situation that is as bizarre as it is improbable" (21). In other words, Manet, who was introduced to Poe through the French translations of Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, makes Poe's "The Raven" his own, instilling "his own meaning and emphases onto Poe's poem with the imposition of his work as a framing force" (26).1 As Magistrale and Slayton explain, moreover, "The line from Poe, the quintessential Romantic, to Mallarmé, one of the central figures of French Symbolism, cannot be underestimated" (29). Indeed, Manet's [End Page 100] intriguing and final of his four illustrations for "The Raven"—which has to be seen to be appreciated—demonstrates the artist's "closest confluence" with Mallarmé's translation of "The Raven" (30). In short, in a...