Originally published by Doubleday in 1972, Daniel Hoffman’s Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe—opening with the indelibly cheeky quip “What, another book on Poe! Who needs it?”—redefined scholarly approaches to Poe’s seemingly anomalous character and the widely mixed reception of his poetry, fiction, and criticism (ix).1 Written in a deeply self-conscious and refreshingly personal critical voice, Poe Poe Poe . . . was inspired by the author’s dissatisfaction with what he felt to be the state of Poe scholarship in the mid-1960s. At the heart of Hoffman’s discontentedness was his observation that despite the cultural upheavals of that decade academic investigation and, more specifically, literary criticism “still reflected the efforts at scientific objectivity once deemed necessary for literary study to be worthy of inclusion in Ph.D. programs.”2 Instead of tailoring analysis to one method or to a single genre or mode of writing, Hoffman’s enterprise involved a comprehensive, multimethod exploration of Poe’s oeuvre as being arranged around a central theme which Poe modulated through his poems, tales, essays, and reviews. The product of a tragically divided man, Poe’s theme, Hoffman argued, is that this known life is “an unmitigated disaster, a spell of suffering, loss, horror, and sorrow, [a] longing almost unbearable” for the primal unity of cosmic oneness from which we come and whence we shall return (327). In his efforts to capture Poe’s oeuvre in all its variety and to “bolt the whole shebang together into one unitary whole” (169), Hoffman boldly suggested that the literary critic, as Henry Golemba put it, “must plunge into Poe’s psyche and partake of his complex imagination, becoming Poe’s semblable, the alter ego of this man.”3 Trying to “think as he thought and to hear with his ear,” Hoffman developed the seminal claim that there are at least seven facets to Poe’s personality which he sought to integrate and unify through his analogously multifaceted body of work (243).Hoffman’s peculiar method of eclectic impressionism called attention to the adequacy of critical methods that emphasize intellectual distancing and objective analysis. According to Hoffman, previous scholars aiming for “scientific objectivity” pursued one of two predominating lines of investigation: the “factual” and the “psychiatric” (ix). Following the more fact-based and magazine-oriented path of inquiry, scholars ranging from Margaret Alterton to Michael Allen focused on tracing Poe’s references, styles, and motifs to their primary sources; scholars like Harvey Allen and A. H. Quinn emphasized, moreover, the importance of explicating biographical details in the context of the literary marketplace in which Poe labored.4 On the other hand, following the more psychoanalytic approach to Poe’s works and eccentric character, scholars like Joseph Wood Krutch and Marie Bonaparte sought to pathologize Poe (and, by association, his admirers) by “treating” Poe’s works as cases of necrophilia, impotence, compensatory aggression, or prenatal consciousness of sexuality.5 While Hoffman’s interpretation of Poe’s oeuvre draws heavily on both of these methods, one of the primary goals of Poe Poe Poe . . . is to “overturn with fact” the notion in conventional criticism that there is “only one permissible and authoritative ‘meaning’ in a work of literature,” that there is only one way to approach and be affected by Poe (xii–xiii). To capture not only the richness and variety but also the coherence and consistency of Poe and his body of work, Hoffman frames his close readings and holistic analysis within an autobiographical narrative of his own struggles and intellectual discoveries while reading Poe again and again over half a lifetime. As he explained to Barbara Cantalupo in her 2002 interview, “I tried to make reading Poe not an occasion to prove where something in his work had come from but a deeply-felt personal experience that would help me explain why his work grips us with such intensity.”6 Tying his own identity as a poet-scholar to Poe’s identity as a poet-critic, Hoffman was a pioneer of reader-response criticism on Poe, as few critics have measured up to the pleasure, profundity, and intimacy of Hoffman’s critical sendups and painstaking analyses.In the preface of his groundbreaking book, Hoffman defines his intervention on the perennial problem of how to unify and contain the contradictoriness of Poe’s career, what Poe scholars would later call, following James Russell Lowell’s famous jest, the genius-fudge dilemma. Contrary to his predecessors’ highbrow assumption that scholars should narrow their focus to works of “sheer genius,” Hoffman challenges both Poe’s harshest critics (from Henry James to T. S. Eliot) and his greatest admirers (from Charles Baudelaire to Paul Valéry) by arguing that “we can’t get [Poe’s] genius without his fudge, or his fudge without his genius. Nor is it a forgone conclusion which is which” (x). Instead of assessing Poe’s incongruities either as reflecting Poe’s lack of coherence and seriousness or as owing to his circumstances of poverty and vicissitude, Hoffman lays the foundation for a middle ground between these two critical veins, the one overly didactic and the other overly artistic. Hoffman, performing the role of a poet-scholar “wishing to do justice to the actual experience of reading Poe,” sees in Poe’s body of work “a view that’s quite coherent; only trouble is, it’s only about three-fifths true” (xi). In other words, not only are the genius and the fudge consistent aspects of Poe’s divided spirit, but also each aspect informs and countervails the other. To understand Poe’s slipperiness as a hoaxer and satirist, as well as the frequent shifts and transitions in his poems and tales, Hoffman, drawing on Poe’s (Schlegellian) theory of unity of effect, establishes the perceptive claim that it is a function of Poe’s aesthetics “that so many mannerisms be interposed between reality and the reader” in order to “touch some deep, responsive nerve hidden in ourselves” (xiii). As conveyed in his book’s playfully haunting title, the Janus-faced multiplicity of Poe’s career is a vital aspect of Poe’s artistic aims and consequently his haunting presence in both criticism and popular culture—hence, “many books, many Poes” (ix). Ultimately, Hoffman’s solution to the genius-fudge dilemma extricated Poe scholars from reductive interpretive paradigms that pathologize or ignore the heterogeneity of Poe and his writing.7While the preface establishes Hoffman’s interventions and aims in writing the book, chapter 1 is on the pervasive ghosts of Poe, on Poe’s haunting presence both in the author’s psyche and in the literary tradition. As T. S. Eliot confessed, “One cannot be sure that one’s own writing has not been influenced by Poe.”8 In critical response to Eliot’s translation of a line from Stéphane Mallarmé’s famous tribute to Poe (“To purify the dialect of the tribe”), Hoffman concludes the first chapter with a cross-question of Mallarmé’s sentiment: “But did Poe really give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe?” (17). The longest and most free-spirited chapter of Poe Poe Poe . . . , chapter 2 sets out to answer this query with an extended reassessment of Poe’s poetry as it relates to the personal and paradigmatic tribulations that informed his philosophy of composition. Arguing that Poe’s recurring themes and motifs originate with the aesthetic universe created in “Al Aaraaf,” Hoffman interprets what he calls, much to his admirers’ chagrin, “Poe’s most ambitious failure” as his romantic rebellion against the stifling, spiritless confines of “the antipoetic materialism of the modern scientific age, the utilitarian logic which drives imagination ‘To seek a shelter in some happier star’” (47). While the poetic quest to overcome and escape from this material world is the highest common denominator of the poetry, this prevailing archetype establishes other motifs that are modulated further in the tales to come, the tales which Hoffman believes “succeeded in creating what his poems failed to create” (60). Hoffman’s frank judgment, regardless of its veracity, has continued to inspire other readers to reexamine the literary merits and faults of the poetry of Poe.9Bridging the poetry and the prose, chapter 3 proposes a rereading of “The Philosophy of Composition” to determine the merit of Poe’s professed method for shocking and discombobulating readers. To both confront and make more bearable “the human thirst for self-torture” and “the luxury of sorrow” (the major themes of “The Raven,” according to Hoffman), Poe adopts the romantic artist’s “unassuageable need . . . to project upon the rest of mankind the terrors and the losses, the sorrows and the insatiate longings of his own soul” (91). Read in this light, “The Philosophy of Composition” is Poe’s analytic description of how to transfer from himself to his reader “those symptoms, those sufferings, those haunted joys” of poetically controlling “the uncontrollable obsessions which haunt him” (91). Whimsically shifting to the tales of ratiocination and detection, chapter 4 frames Poe’s detectives, William Legrand of “The Gold-Bug” and the seminal C. Auguste Dupin, as poet-mathematicians who combine poetic intuition with analytic intelligence in their Poe-ietic efforts to crack seemingly impossible codes and uncanny mysteries. Finding the same theme but different tones between poems like “Lenore,” “The Raven,” and “Annabel Lee” on the one hand and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” on the other, Hoffman argues that what “the poems render with pathos, longing, the music of despair and a dreamy vagueness, is dramatized in the tale with circumstantial horror and terrifying precision.” (110). The detectives embody, in short, Poe’s version of the Romantic genius of the age, as they both exhibit “the passion of an intuitive intelligence comprehending truth in a world of violent action” (112). Ironically, contrary to Hoffman’s effort to free Poe’s work from a single interpretation, chapter 4 concludes with one of the most convincing interpretations of the open-ended question of who wrote the incriminating letter in “The Purloined Letter,” an interpretation that has been largely ignored by later critics, with the notable exception of Russell Reising’s more recent meta-critical extrapolation of Hoffman’s reading.10Opening with Hoffman’s two-part axiom that the “happy characters in Poe are those who use their heads” and “the tormented, those who lose them,” chapter 5 turns to Poe’s four variations of the tormented voyage (135): the vortical descents (“A Descent into the Maelstrom,” “MS. Found in a Bottle”), the puckish sendups (“The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall,” “The Balloon Hoax”), the out-of-body experiments (“Mesmeric Revelations,” “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”), and the apocalyptic revelations (“The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” “The Power of Words”). From his analysis of these different “voyages,” Hoffman ends the chapter with the familiar anachronistic projection (à la Allen Tate and Richard Wilbur) that they demonstrate Poe’s ascription to the “symbolist religion of [autonomous] art,” which is meant to offset the modern nihilistic sense that “we are all runaways and orphans, inheriting a sterile life without spirit” (176). Shifting from Poe’s faith in Art to his scorn for the sociopolitical realities of the States, chapter 6 shows how in his satires “Edgarpoe, symbolist seeker of Beauty, merges into Hoaxiepoe in buckskins and endeavors to make us laugh” (180). Though Hoffman provides excellent context in his historicist readings of Poe’s satiric ventures into money (“Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences,” “Von Kempelen and His Discovery”), politics (“Mellonta Tauta,” Some Words with a Mummy,” “The Man That Was Used Up”), and the social order (“The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether”), I was expecting more from Hoffman’s segue into the humorous and satirical aspects of Hoaxiepoe and “Funny Edgar” (240).11 A potential consequence of Hoffman’s larger aims to free Poe from any one standard meaning, to maintain the grand themes of loss and suffering, or to adhere to Poe’s “nihilism as a metaphysics,” the chapter does not address the corrective potential of Poe’s satires—that is, their power to disgust, delight, and instruct (172). Just one year after Poe Poe Poe . . . was published, G. R. Thompson’s Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (1973) filled this discursive gap by presenting Poe as an occasionally sophisticated satirist informed largely by Friedreich Schlegel’s philosophy of Romantic irony and A. W. Schlegel’s dramatic theory of unity of effect. In Robert Tally Jr.’s more recent study Poe and the Subversion of American Literature: Satire, Fantasy, Critique (2014), the “flawed” aspects Thompson saw in Poe’s satire are reinterpreted as a deliberate subversion of U.S. American literature and, ultimately, as a sign of Poe’s “critical rejection of the national literary tradition itself.”12At the start of chapter 7, “Grotesques and Arabesques,” Hoffman lays the groundwork for identifying the formal distinctions and dialectic relations between the grotesques and the arabesques. Highlighting the terms’ roots in the visual arts, Hoffman argues that in Poe’s fiction “a grotesque is a satire, an arabesque a prose equivalent of a poem,” and that the two modes are not mutually exclusive (203). Unifying the two modes, Poe mocks the achievements of his own arabesques (“The Masque of the Red Death,” “Ligeia,” “The Cask of Amontillado”) through his grotesques (“King Pest,” “The Spectacles,” “The Premature Burial”), so that “ecstatic transcendence may be lodged in the heart of a hoax” (206). Fine-tuning the dialectics of this distinction, David Ketterer in The Rationale of Deception in Poe (1979) defines the arabesque mode as “the ideal as perceived from mundane reality” and the grotesque mode as “the mundane as perceived through the projected ideal of reality.”13 While Hoffman’s theoretical distinctions are innovative, his separate readings in the remainder of chapter 6 and in chapter 7 (“The Marriage Group”) are, as Kermit Vanderbilt indicates, “curiously uneventful,” as they largely recapitulate Marie Bonaparte’s Freudian analysis of Poe.14 But honestly, who am I to judge this aspect of Hoffman’s Poe, the Poe of an eccentric poet-scholar who was known to bear witness to social injustice and to reckon with “private sufferings and public sorrows”?15 Unlike Hoffman’s terrifying initiation into Poe, my first encounter with Poe—that is, with The Simpsons’ legendary adaptation of “The Raven” (which first aired the same year I was born)—was marked, as one may expect, by a strange sense of humorous and pleasurable wonder (hence, my desire for more on Funny Edgar in chapter 6). I did not feel haunted by Poe in the same way as did young Horror-Haunted Hoffman, who would later, as Poefessor Hoffman, find Bonaparte’s pathological analysis as a necessary framework for unpacking and reordering his initial resentment of Poe.Playing on the tripartite division of faculty psychology, chapters 9, 10, and 11 focus on what Hoffman describes as the “three compendia of [Poe’s] themes,” each edging “inexorably toward apocalypse, the unavoidable condition of wisdom, by a different route” (i.e., by body, mind, and soul) (259): The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym’s exploration of the body of the world through the eponymous character’s own body (260), Eureka’s “depersonalized and mechanical characterization of the psychic rhythm of existence” (274), and lastly the metaphor of the self, the fable of the soul of “The Fall of the House of Usher” (296). While the ninth and eleventh chapters strategically reiterate Freudian concepts of split consciousness, the death drive, the Oedipus complex, and the fantasy of rebirth, the tenth chapter, on Eureka, is a brilliant synthesis of Poe’s conflicting aspects into his cosmological vision. In this view, Poe’s dualistic themes and agonistic moods become features of the “perfect plot of God that all being, inorganic and organic alike, desires its own destruction,” desires that solipsistically reflect and inflect the hidden rhythms of the machinations of Poe’s Universe (286). In response to Hoffman’s conjecture that what Eureka “propounds as physical laws are really psychal laws” (286), John Tresch has more recently posited that Poe’s syncretic multiplicity is not limited to Poe’s character and styles but also “applies to his pluralist view of reality.”16 Defining this pluralist view and arabesque mode as a “kaleidoscopic realism,” Tresch discovers in this viewpoint an approximation of the methodological critique embedded in Hoffman’s eclectic impressionism of Poe’s aesthetic principles: “New configurations of reality arise according to the domains on which we focus and the tools that shape our answers.”17While most readers of Poe Poe Poe . . . praise Hoffman’s sustained effort to explicate and unify the contradictions and dualities of Poe’s oeuvre, Hoffman’s offbeat, confessional voice proved to be the book’s most controversial intervention in Poe studies.18 “Conventional” Poe scholars, Hoffman reflected during Cantalupo’s interview, “were outraged by my informality, indignant at the liberties I had taken with literary discourse, like inventing nicknames—Oedgar, Hoaxiepoe, Edgarpoe (to suggest French responses), Horror-Haunted Edgar—and injecting myself into scholarly analyses.”19 However unorthodox Hoffman’s critical-autobiographical approach may be in the context of academic circles, a careful, Hoffman-esque reading of chapter 1’s opening paragraph—that is, as an internal “comment upon and extension of the rest of his [book]”—may help reveal the deeper implications of his confessional devices (xii).A playful homage to the opening paragraph of Allen Tate’s essay “Our Cousin, Mr. Poe,” the first chapter of Poe Poe Poe . . . begins with the author’s childhood memory of himself gazing at a facsimile of a daguerreotype portrait of Poe. But whereas Tate briefly notes his adolescent wish to one day resemble Poe’s image, Hoffman starts chapter 1 with an ingenious introspection on his adolescent hatred toward that image that “haunted [his] dreams and waking dreams” (2):As the second sentence’s past tense and fronted clause indicate, the hand that wrote “I hate Poe” and signed Hoffman’s name is not that which composed Poe Poe Poe . . . , the one that flipped through more than just Poe’s poetry. By critically distancing himself from the compulsive actions of a former self (i.e., the Poefessor from the Horror-Haunted boy), Hoffman initiates readers into his eclectic method of reader-response criticism, a method through which readers may discover that their personal reactions and preferred methods contribute to the aesthetic effects the author had all along intended. Admittedly, I did laugh the first time reading this paragraph; but when I returned to it for subsequent readings and recalled my initial response, I found myself smiling, pleasurably realizing the effectiveness of Hoffman’s Poe-esque ruse. Though I cannot identify with Hoffman’s initial reaction to Poe (nor with Tate’s for that matter), his introspective process of discovery, which elicits more discovery, made me confront the underlying assumptions and perceived incongruities that triggered my initial burst of mirth. Still under the spell of Hoffman’s style and design, I now look at all the cheeky annotations penciled within my Doubleday edition as “a hieroglyph in secret code.” Less a sign of egoism than a testament to the revelatory power of Hoffman’s unique style of reader-response criticism, this opening confession encapsulates Hoffman’s claim that to crack the code of cryptic Poe, readers must face the “complexity of implication, [the] plumbing of the abyss of human nature, and [the] strange webwork of consistency” among the various literary forms that constitute Poe’s kaleidoscopic body of work (xi). As indicated in the concluding chapter, Hoffman’s book catalyzes readers to return to Poe with more open eyes and to be honest and more careful about how their methodological tools and reading experiences with Poe actively participate in the creative process powered by a strange rhythmic volition to know the unknown of oneself in the images of Poe.20
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Mar 12, 2024
Andrea Peruničić 