Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses

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EDGAR ALLAN POE AND THE MASSES

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EDGAR ALLAN POE AND THE MASSES T H E POL I T IC AL ECONOM Y O F L I T E R AT U R E I N ANTEBEL LUM AMERICA

TERENCE WHALEN

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright  1999 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Whalen, Terence, 1959– Edgar Allan Poe and the masses : the political economy of literature in antebellum America /Terence Whalen. p.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-00199-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809–1849—Contemporary America. 2. Literature—Economic aspects—United States—History— 19th century.

3. Authorship—Economic aspects—United States—

History—19th century.

4. Capitalism and literature—United

States—History—19th century.

5. Politics and literature—

United States—History—19th century.

6. Literature—

Publishing—United States—History—19th century. readers—United States—History—19th century. literature—United States—History and criticism. United States—History—19th century. PS2633.W48

1999 818′.309—dc21

7. Authors and

8. Popular 9. Mass media—

I. Title. 98-43053

CIP

This book has been composed in Berkeley Book The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper) http://pup.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 10

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8 7

6

5 4

3 2

1

For Robin


CONTENTS

PREFACE ix LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS xi PART ONE: CAPITALISM AND LITERATURE

1

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: Minor Writing and the Capital Reader 3 CHAPTER TWO

The Horrid Laws of Political Economy 21 CHAPTER THREE

Fables of Circulation: Poe’s Influence on the Messenger

58

CHAPTER FOUR

Poe and the Masses

76

PART TWO: RACE AND REGION 109 CHAPTER FIVE

Average Racism: Poe, Slavery, and the Wages of Literary Nationalism

111

CHAPTER SIX

Subtle Barbarians: The Southern Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe PART THREE: MASS CULTURE

147

193

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Code for Gold: Poe and Cryptography 195 CHAPTER EIGHT

Culture of Surfaces

225

CHAPTER NINE

The Investigating Angel: Poe, Babbage, and “The Power of Words” 249 NOTES

275

INDEX 323


PREFACE

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DGAR ALLAN POE and the Masses explores the relationship between literature and capitalism in antebellum America. Broadly concerned with the emergence of a national culture before the Civil War, the book focuses on Poe because he exemplifies, as much as anyone, the predicament of a “poor-devil author” in an age of social and economic turmoil. Through a series of far-reaching investigations, the book unfolds a new account of the American publishing industry, which had begun to regulate nearly all aspects of literary creation. Poe was acutely aware of the consequences of the new publishing environment, for like his character Roderick Usher, he possessed an uncanny sensitivity to material powers in the world around him, powers which seemed to foretell the impending triumph of matter over mind. Sometimes Poe described this impending transformation in cosmological terms, but on other occasions he meticulously analyzed “the magazine prison-house” and the “horrid laws of political economy.” Contrary to his image as an artist who was “out of space, out of time,” Poe responded to his economic predicament in a variety of ways, ranging from theoretical pronouncements on literary value to practical ventures in the magazine business. Poe and the Masses accordingly departs from critical lore and instead depicts a writer who was both product and portent of an emerging mass culture. Making extensive use of primary materials, the individual chapters offer several new contributions to our understanding of Poe and his world: the first fully documented interpretation of Poe’s response to American slavery; the first accurate account of Poe’s performance as a literary entrepreneur; a new explanation of Poe’s ambivalence toward nationalism, exploration, and imperialism; a detailed inquiry into the conflict between “secret writing” and common knowledge in Jacksonian America; and a general interpretation of the social meaning of Poe’s innovations in literature and criticism. As I suggest in the final chapter, Poe’s inability to escape the “horrid laws of political economy” ultimately inspired his recurrent dream of a material language that could transport him beyond the bounds of capitalist regulation.

. . . . . I am grateful to the many people who helped make this book possible. A reading group at Duke University gave me confidence to pursue this project; my thanks to Tito Basu, Joe Cole, Tim Dayton, Craig Hanks, Angela Hubler, Caren Irr, Carolyn Lesjak, Bill Maxwell, and many visitors. I am also grateful to Professors Cathy Davidson, Robert Gleckner, Ric Roderick, and

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P R E FAC E

Susan Willis for their advice on the manuscript. I am especially obliged to Professor Louis Budd, whose unwavering support helped me persevere through many trials. Several institutions provided support for research and writing. I am grateful to the Commonwealth Center at the College of William and Mary for a postdoctoral fellowship. My special thanks to Chandos Brown and Thad Tate for making this possible. In addition, I received invaluable support from the following sources: the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Virginia Historical Society, and the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Material from Chapters Two and Eight appeared in American Quarterly as “Edgar Allan Poe and the Horrid Laws of Political Economy” (September 1992). An early version of Chapter Seven was published in Representations as “The Code for Gold: Edgar Allan Poe and Cryptography” (spring 1994). In ways subtle and direct, I have benefitted from the work of many readers. Mary Altomare helped me through the formative stages, for which I am deeply grateful. The following readers provided advice on all or part of the manuscript: Glen Brewster, Brian Higgins, Nancy Isenberg, Howard Kerr, J. Gerald Kennedy, Donald Marshall, Dana Nelson, Louis Renza, J. V. Ridgely, Kirk Savage, Liliane Weissberg, and Sharon Zuber. Robin Grey contributed to the entire project, partly by revising the errata of the manuscript, and partly by enduring the errata of its author. This book is dedicated to her.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Complete Works ER Letters Poe Log Pollin, ed., Collected Writings PT

The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, 17 vols. 1902; New York: AMS Press, 1965. Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson. New York: Library of America, 1984. The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom, 2 vols. 1948; New York: Gordian Press, 1966. The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809– 1849. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Burton R. Pollin. Vol. 1. Boston: Twayne, 1981; Vols. 2–5. New York: Gordian Press, 1985–97. Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New York: Library of America, 1984.


PART ONE CAPITALISM AND LITERATURE


Chapter One INTRODUCTION MINOR WRITING AND THE CAPITAL READER

I. THE TRUTH OF SURFACES

A

LTHOUGH HE trafficked in arcane and mysterious lore, Poe also liked to shock his readers by celebrating the truth of surfaces, that vast realm of superficial knowledge which is visible out of the corner of one’s eye. Those who gaze intently into the nighttime sky see only the star, but someone who “surveys it less inquisitively is conscious of all for which the star is useful to us below—its brilliancy and beauty.”1 This method is useful for surveying Poe’s own work, for by focusing less intently on a single text, the oblique perspective is in many ways more able to register a multitude of historical forces and to trace their subtle dominion over everyday life. So instead of beginning with a canonical text, I shall take a wayward glance at the working conditions of the 1836 Southern Literary Messenger, where Poe landed his first full-time job in the publishing industry. And instead of concentrating exclusively on the major author himself, this introduction shall also investigate the work of Lucian Minor, a progressive Southern intellectual whose forgotten writings Poe edited and sometimes imitated. Successive chapters of this study explore larger issues in the political economy of literature—ranging from the rise of a capitalist publishing industry, to the role of slavery in literary nationalism, to the creation of new narrative forms such as the detective story. But all of these issues are in some way prefigured by the casual association of Poe and Minor. Brought momentarily together by an intricate web of circumstances, the two writers soon encountered differences that prevented them from sharing a common destiny. These differences are especially significant, for although Poe and Minor were products of the same culture and candidates for the same editorial job at the Messenger, they disagreed markedly about the fate of literature in a developing capitalist economy. The contrast between Poe and Minor reveals much about the rise of a mass culture in antebellum America, and this in turn casts new light on the relation between the production of literature and what has been thought of as production in general. Such an oblique beginning would perhaps be unnecessary were it not for the vast accumulation of critical and cultural sediment which threatens to distort Poe’s historical situation beyond all hope of recovery. This sediment derives from a variety of sources, ranging from the French appropriations of

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C A P I T A L I S M A N D L I T E R AT U R E

Poe by Baudelaire, Lacan, and Derrida, to the familiar American portrayals by such mass cultural luminaries as Bella Lugosi, Vincent Price, and Homer Simpson. Given the diversity of these representations, one might easily despair of finding some middle ground between the sublime and the ridiculous, or of even being able to tell with any certainty which is which. Adding to the confusion is the long tradition of literary commentary which, quite paradoxically, uses historical and biographical evidence to demonstrate Poe’s isolation from “external” social conditions. Commencing with his death in 1849, for example, Poe was variously depicted as an opium-crazed visionary or as the more conventional romantic outcast, both of which were improvements over his earlier image as a drunken beggar. Early in the twentieth century, Vernon Louis Parrington advanced this tradition by portraying Poe as an aesthetecraftsman who was out of step with his time. Frustrated by the apparent anomalies of his subject, Parrington struggled to construct a meaningful historical context but despairingly concluded that “the problem of Poe, fascinating as it is, lies quite outside the main current of American thought.” Despite many noteworthy exceptions, this trend continues in postwar and contemporary studies, especially those which rely on psychoanalysis to sequester Poe from social and economic pressures. In the Literary History of the United States, for example, F. O. Matthiessen commences the section on Poe with matter-offact references to a deep “psychological insecurity” and “overwrought nervous system.” In his influential biography, Arthur Hobson Quinn similarly contends that Poe’s “emotional life” deserves greater attention than “quarrels and disputes with persons now forgotten.” More recently, Frank Lentricchia invokes Poe to redefine the romantic outcast as someone who resists the discursive formation despite heavy emotional and psychic costs, and in the latest major biography, Kenneth Silverman renews the outcast thesis by emphasizing Poe’s childhood trauma and alleged psychological disintegration. Aptly summarizing the belief in emotional exemption from history, Louis Rubin argues that Poe “inhabited a realm that was ‘out of place, out of time’ ” because he was psychologically unfit for the rigors of the commercial marketplace.2 The very persistence of this approach begs a question: if Poe wasn’t in step with his time, then where was he? As I have suggested, this problem can be clarified by the example of Lucian Minor, a lost writer whose surname conveniently and perhaps fatefully describes his status in American literary history. Although Minor is now remembered only as a footnote to Poe, a greater destiny seemed to await him in 1835. At this time Minor had just commenced a twenty-four-year stint as the commonwealth’s attorney for Louisa County, Virginia, but he was already acting the part of what we would today call a public intellectual. By all indications, Minor had made a conscious decision to sacrifice his private life and professional ambition in order to devote himself to the larger social issues of his day, especially those issues which could be addressed in the pages of the Southern

I N T ROD UC T I O N

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Literary Messenger. Poe, on the other hand, had nothing left to sacrifice. At twenty-six years of age, Poe lived in cramped quarters with relatives in Baltimore, and his vocational prospects had grown exceedingly slim. By 1835, he had dropped out of the University of Virginia, served for two years in the U.S. Army, and trained briefly at West Point before deliberately provoking his own court-martial. Most importantly, he had been spurned—emotionally and financially—by his foster-father, a Richmond tobacco merchant named John Allan. This left Poe to his own meager devices: he was an unknown apprentice writer without family money and without any job offers in the publishing industry. Poe undoubtedly realized the nature of his predicament, and the warnings he received would have clarified his situation even further. One Baltimore literatus, attempting to rescue Poe from his apparent destiny, advised him in no uncertain terms that he must put aside the tragedy he had been composing and begin “drudging upon whatever may make money.”3 Given the undistinguished record of Poe in 1835, it is no surprise that Thomas Willis White, the proprietor of the Messenger, should have preferred Lucian Minor. In February 1835, White in fact offered Minor $800.00 a year to assume editorial duties for the magazine. To sweeten the deal, he even threw in some secondhand cajolery. Alluding to “highly colored panegyrick,” White repeated what he had purportedly heard from all quarters: “Get Lucian Minor, Get Lucian Minor, he is the man for you.”4 Minor, of course, was not the man, and later that year White reluctantly offered the job to Poe for ten dollars a week. It was an offer he couldn’t refuse, but Poe’s acceptance of one opportunity foreclosed other options. In particular, his entrance into what he called “the magazine prison-house” forever prevented him from becoming the kind of public intellectual epitomized by Lucian Minor. Disturbed by Virginia’s “lagging march” toward progress, Minor dedicated himself to a variety of reform projects, ranging from public education to African colonization to temperance.5 He composed articles on all of these topics for Southern periodicals. As illustrated by his series of “Letters from New England,” Minor often argued that Virginia should emulate the more liberal social and educational practices of northern states. Although he expended considerable effort on these articles, Minor never thought of his writing as a career; like many intellectuals in antebellum America, he distinguished between his salaried work (commonwealth attorney) and his literary donations to the public good. In many ways, then, Lucian Minor represented the social conscience that Poe could not afford. During what we today call free time, Minor used the Messenger as a “vehicle of LIGHT” to communicate or “commune” with an audience of worthy citizenreaders. Setting high standards for both writers and subscribers, Minor argued that contributors to the Messenger should be motivated by “the pure wish to diffuse light and to do good,” and that the audience should in turn comprise “the enlightened, the fair, the exalted in station!”6 Poe, in contrast, confronted

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his audience through the medium of capital. In a literary workshop overseen by a profit-driven publisher, he produced texts for a mass of anonymous readers who were distinguished primarily by an act of purchase; their civic virtues, and indeed their virtues as readers, were matters of secondary importance. This initial difference in material conditions had lifelong repercussions: whereas Minor went on to participate in an ever-widening circle of reform movements, Poe’s political agenda was increasingly confined to the point of production itself.7 Production, however, does not lend itself to techniques of close reading, and it has therefore devolved upon literary historians to explain the complex relations between culture and political economy. In the case of Poe, unfortunately, this poses some problems, for the very scholars committed to analyzing the social determinants of writing are also the scholars most likely to be repulsed by Poe’s apparent ideology—by his avowed elitism and his habitual denunciation of that mysterious collectivity known as “the mob.”8 Many studies of the literary marketplace accordingly reflect a certain reticence toward Poe. In R. Jackson Wilson’s Figures of Speech: American Writers and the Literary Marketplace, to take one of the better examples, Poe is avoided in favor of Franklin, Irving, William Lloyd Garrison, Emerson, Dickinson and (in the epilogue) Whitman.9 Michael Gilmore’s American Romanticism and the Marketplace also omits Poe, but to his credit, Gilmore does hold out the possibility for some future consideration. “One would expect,” he writes, “to discover that dependency on the market inspired [Poe] with a similar mixture of accommodation and resistance.”10 Even if applied, however, the “market” approach would still present difficulties. In its common acceptation, the concept of a market explains very little about the forces and social relations that constitute a mode of production. Nor does it tell us much about the antebellum publishing environment, which comprised cultural traditions, political conflicts, and of course a wide range of properly economic conditions, some of which were similar to those in other capitalist economies, and some of which were specific to the United States. To complicate matters further, specific economic conditions must themselves be interpreted or rendered intelligible through some narrative of historical change, such as the rise of a distinctly capitalist mode of production, or as the territorial expansion that John L. O’Sullivan euphemized as “manifest destiny,” or as the emergence of a national infrastructure which George Rogers Taylor has dubbed “the transportation revolution.”11 All of these partial narratives—even the modest story of infrastructural development—shed some light on the political economy of antebellum literature. Improvements in transportation, for example, facilitated the circulation of both objects and information. Obviously, many books and magazines were intended solely for entertainment. But in order for the nation to develop and compete in the world market, the United States also required a swift and reliable system to disseminate in-


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formation about prices, foreign markets, shipping schedules, labor disputes, trade regulations, patent laws, new manufacturing techniques, and innovations in the prevailing conditions for agricultural and industrial production. As foster son to a tobacco exporter, clerk in the army, and laborer in the publishing industry of virtually every major city of the United States, Poe would have understood the difference between information, which is destined to re-enter the process of production, and literature, which is designed to teach or delight an individual reader. The periodic crises in the American economy accentuated the value of information and information networks, but these crises also signalled the fitful and momentous character of capitalist production in the nineteenth century. As I will show in Chapters Two and Four, the Panic of 1837 gave rise to a period of combined and uneven development in the publishing industry, and this in turn compelled Poe and other commercial writers to confront multiple and conflicting versions of the future—any one of which could be expected to emerge from the crucible of economic depression. In other words, Poe’s writing was regulated not only by the market per se, but also by the instability in the publishing industry, the national investment in a capitalist future, and the rise of information as an economic good, all of which tended to undermine traditional standards of literary value by stressing the growing complicity between capitalism and signification. Contrary to his image, Poe was an exceedingly perceptive witness to the new conditions of literary production. Writing to raise money for his magazine project, he claims to have foreseen that “the country from its very constitution, could not fail of affording in a very few years, a larger proportionate amount of readers than any upon the Earth,” and that “the whole energetic, busy spirit of the age tended . . . to the Magazine literature—to the curt, the terse, the well-timed, and the readily diffused, in preference to the old forms of the verbose and . . . the inaccessible.”12 Poe also realized that the waning of old forms would expose literature to what he called “the horrid laws of political economy.”13 Since he could not support himself by writing poetry, he had to adapt his talents to the unstable and perhaps unfathomable tastes of a distant mass audience. Some of his most extravagant tales were, by his own admission, composed “to supply a particular demand.”14 He used similar commercial phrases to describe the overall condition of American letters. In his critical and editorial writings, he frequently referred to “literary commodities,” “literary enterprises,” “the general market for literary wares,” and to “the saleableness of literature.”15 But Poe’s starkest application of economic doctrine came at the beginning of his career, at the very moment when he was trying to land the job that Lucian Minor had just refused. In March 1835, Poe published the gruesome tale “Berenice” in the Southern Literary Messenger. Told by a monomaniac who is obsessed with the teeth of his cousin/fiancée, the tale recounts the apparent

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death of Berenice and the narrator’s subsequent visit to her grave site in a trance-like fit of bereavement. The shocking truth of his midnight visit is revealed at the end of the story: the narrator has dug up the coffin and extracted the teeth of Berenice, who turns out to have been alive when her grave and her mouth were violated. Not surprisingly, the tale aroused some complaints, so in an April 1835 letter to Thomas White, Poe defended his writing against what he considered to be an overly fastidious editorial policy. Emphasizing the hard facts of literary business, Poe argues that a publisher—and by extension, a writer—must be less concerned with the “taste” of the reading public than with the circulation of the magazine: The history of all magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in nature to Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. . . . But whether the articles of which I speak are, or are not in bad taste is little to the point. To be appreciated you must be read. . . . I propose to furnish you every month with a Tale of the nature which I have alluded to. The effect—if any—will be estimated better by the circulation of the Magazine than by any comments upon its contents.16

Coming from someone who was purportedly unfit for commercial society, this is a startling declaration. It is also startling that the author of “Berenice” would see fit to lecture a capitalist proprietor about the true nature of capitalism itself. Whether or not Poe was sincere, the passage reveals his willingness to speak a language that Thomas White could understand. Significantly, such a language would have appalled Lucian Minor as much as it enticed White, for it dismisses matters of mere taste and sensibility in order to focus more intently on the bottom line of literary production. Forsaking the opportunity “to diffuse light and to do good,” Poe adopted a calculating, aggressive stance toward his craft and toward the mass audience whose “taste” would henceforth be measured by gross acts of purchase. Occurring at the commencement of his career, the “Berenice” incident affords several insights into Poe’s development as a commercial writer. Given the content of the story, one cannot help suspecting that Poe’s reference to the “bad taste” of “Berenice” is a grotesque pun. Moreover, Poe claims in the same letter that “the tale originated in a bet that I could produce nothing effective on a subject so singular” (57). Thus one of Poe’s earliest and most ghastly tales seems to have been motivated less by morbid fancy than by a pun or a bet. Poe’s aesthetic justification for the tale is also worth noting, for he rejects the Messenger’s policy on stylistic “simplicity” in favor of a more profitable approach consisting of “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful couloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and the mystical.”17 Finally, the “Berenice” incident comprises one of Poe’s earliest efforts to identify and explain the rational basis of irrational art, a tactic he later repeated in “The Philosophy of


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Composition.” In “The Philosophy of Composition,” however, Poe conspicuously demurs from describing the economic necessity which, “in the first place,” motivated him to compose a salable text (ER, 15), whereas in the “Berenice” letter he concentrates on this primal necessity almost to the exclusion of all other considerations. It is not for us to know whether this rational justification actually preceded the composition of “Berenice,” or whether Poe invented it as a kind of exculpatory afterthought to show the profits of horror. But whatever the precise order of action and justification, it is clear that in Poe’s career as a commercial writer, the first alibi was profit, the first science was political economy. Poe’s precocious grasp of political economy challenges the widespread assumption that writing begins as a pure or traditional activity that capitalism later reorganizes, however gradually, into a form of commodity production. Poe’s early poetry may have been insulated by a semi-autonomous tradition, but his tales were expressly summoned forth by the new economic order that emerged from the Panic of 1837.18 During the economic depression that lasted from 1837 to 1843, Poe came to realize that “the higher order of poetry is, and always will be, in this country, unsaleable.”19 Responding to the greater demand for prose “articles,” his literary output in this period shifted dramatically from poems to tales. In crude measurements based on titles and publication dates, Poe’s production of the relatively lucrative tale more than doubled during the depression, whereas his output of unsalable poetry declined by nearly 90 percent. In other words, instead of corrupting old genres, the Panic of 1837 gave birth to new forms of literature that were less encumbered by history and tradition. And because the publishing industry was (to retool a phrase) always already the condition of possibility for his cultural production, the particular style and substance of his fiction cannot be attributed to the mysterious operations of an “overwrought nervous system.” Far from being the wild offspring of an autonomous or diseased mind, Poe’s tales were in many ways the rational products of social labor, imagined and executed in the workshop of American capitalism. The true conditions of this workshop were starkly revealed to Poe in the spring of 1836, when he asked Harper & Brothers to publish his tales as a book. Then Poe discovered that every commercial writer—whether genius or hack—wrote not for an undifferentiated public but for three distinct types of virtual readers. First was the Ideal Reader—the reader of taste with whom an author would willingly develop a bond of sympathy. Second was the Feared Reader—the anonymous collective reader Poe designated with such names as the “mob,” the “demagogue-ridden public,” the “rabble,” or simply “the masses.” Poe acknowledges the existence of these two kinds of readers on numerous occasions, most notably in “The Philosophy of Composition,” where he describes “the necessity . . . of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste” (ER, 15).

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But Poe’s relation to both the Ideal and the Feared Reader was mediated by a third entity who acted as the embodiment of capital itself. The existence of a mediator between author and audience is implied in many of Poe’s descriptions of the literary market, as when he complains of “those cliques which, hanging like nightmares upon American literature, manufacture, at the nod of our principal booksellers, a pseudo-public opinion by wholesale.”20 While negotiating with Harpers in 1836, however, Poe encountered this mediating entity in its most menacing form—not as a mere literary clique, but as a reader who wielded absolute power over publication. Acting on Poe’s behalf, James Kirke Paulding had approached the Brothers Harper in an attempt to strike a deal; when Poe’s manuscript was rejected, Paulding offered the following explanation: By the way, you are entirely mistaken in your idea of my influence over these gentlemen in the transactions of their business. They have a Reader, by whose judgment they are guided in their publications, and like all other traders are governed by their anticipations of profit or loss, rather than any intrinsic merit of a work or its author. I have no influence in this respect, and indeed ought to have none. . . .21

According to advertisements, Harpers relied upon “learned authorities” only to guarantee the propriety and morality of new publications.22 Paulding, however, tells a very different story about these hired readers. Whether motivated by bitter experience or avuncular concern, Paulding introduces Poe to the real House of Harper, exposing the calculating and capitalist foundation of its publishing decisions. In so doing, Paulding casually hints at a deep connection between gross economic forces and the creative activity of literary producers. Writers necessarily have some notion of audience which, above and beyond any actual feedback, guides them in the production of texts. Paulding’s letter suggests that the first audience for a literary commodity is neither a sympathetic interpreter nor even an anonymous magazine subscriber, but instead an entirely different kind of critic who can only be called the Capital Reader. Although Paulding may have had a particular person in mind, the Capital Reader need not be construed as a specific biological or legal entity, but instead as a personification of the peculiar logic that accompanied the new publishing industry. A precedent for such a personification can be found in Marx’s Capital: As the conscious bearer of this movement [of capital], the possessor of money becomes a capitalist. His person, or rather his pocket, is the point from which the money starts, and to which it returns. The objective content of the circulation we have been discussing—the valorization of value—is his subjective purpose, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more wealth in the abstract is the sole driving force behind his operations that he functions as a capitalist, i.e. as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will.23


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In the letter explaining why Poe’s manuscript was rejected, Paulding offers a similar explanation of the American publishing industry. Like Marx’s living incarnation of capital, the decision-maker at Harper & Brothers is more or less consciously motivated by “anticipations of profit or loss, rather than any intrinsic merit of a work or its author.” More importantly, Paulding characterizes the publishing firm as a virtual reader, a characterization designed to expose the vaguely sordid intimacy of literary creation and capitalist production. Knowledge of this intimacy would haunt Poe throughout his career. In the 1840 prospectus of The Penn Magazine, for example, Poe felt compelled to deny any part in the general corruption, claiming that his criticism remained independent and that circumstances had “not yet taught him to read through the medium of a publisher’s will” (ER, 1024). He protests too much and too late, for as shall become clear in the second half of this chapter, the Capital Reader had come to regulate not only the rough movements of the publishing industry, but also the more delicate ventures of the imagination itself.

II. CRISIS OF SURPLUS On the front page of the February 1836 Messenger, Lucian Minor published an editorial decrying what may have been the most cataclysmic tendency of a capitalist publishing industry, namely the tendency toward literary overproduction. “Go to the Library of one of our Colleges,” he begins, and “you are astonished that human thought or human industry could have produced such an accumulation.” Next he turns to the North, where he sees collections swelling beyond forty-thousand volumes. Finally, when his bibliometric gaze extends to Europe, Minor is stunned to discover immense libraries containing upwards of one hundred and fifty thousand volumes. And every day, according to Minor, the burden grows heavier, the crisis of accumulation more acute. From the bookseller’s catalogues to the host of reviews and magazines to the countless newspapers, tracts, pamphlets, and addresses, the literate American is confronted by “effusions of ten thousand various forms and merits—craving your attention and bewildering your choice!” The political implications of this were not lost on Minor. He of course advocated a wider diffusion of knowledge among the lower classes, but unlike most reformers Minor worried about the effect of such a policy on an intellectual elite that already seemed saturated with information. In his view, an abundance of reading material could in fact destroy the republican harmony it was meant to encourage, primarily by sundering the public sphere into specialized discursive “coteries”: Go forth into society: in one circle, politics—in another, canalling or railroad lore— in a third, some point touching the Campaigns of Bonaparte, the Wars of the League,

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the American Revolution, or the Conquests of Tamerlane—in a fourth, the beauties of Greek and Roman literature—in a fifth, some topic in Chemistry or Geology—in a sixth, Byron, Campbell, Moore and Wordsworth—in a seventh, the last fifty novels—are discussed by their respective coteries, each, as if that subject alone threw all others into the shade. And if you are not so torpid as to be incapable of excitement by sympathy with others . . . you cannot, for your life, help wishing to be familiar with each theme. You go home; and plunge headlong into a dozen different studies. Your acquisitions are huddled chaotically into your knowledge-box, so that you have a full, distinct idea, of no one subject: you can never get hold of what you want, at the moment when you need it; but must rummage over an immense pile of trumpery, with a bare hope, after all, of finding the useful article you want. You are a shallow smatterer.

Attempting to imagine the full cultural implications of overproduction, Minor here reveals his deepest fears about the precarious and imperiled status of the traditional thinking subject. At some point the quantitative increase in printed material had produced a qualitative transformation in the republic of letters, and because of this transformation, readers could never again hope to plumb the farthest limits of the textual world. The publishing industry, which once served as the emissary of total knowledge, had somehow become its greatest enemy. Because he had no hope of controlling the publishing industry, Minor devised a plan, based on the scarcity of reading time, for surviving the impending years of literary overproduction. According to Minor’s calculations, no human could hope to read more than sixteen hundred books in a literate lifetime of forty years. Only by “disavow[ing] an acquaintance with a fashionable novel” or a “fashionable science” could one triumph over “the millions of tomes that litter the world.” Minor therefore counseled his readers to have the courage “to remain ignorant of those useless subjects which are generally valued.” Poe’s response to the crisis was more complex. He could not deny the sheer material force of literary overproduction, especially insofar as it affected the working conditions of a commercial magazinist. In a review written eight months after Minor’s editorial, Poe in fact offered his own diagnosis of the crisis: The enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge, is one of the greatest evils of this age; since it presents one of the most serious obstacles to the acquisition of correct information, by throwing in the reader’s way piles of lumber, in which he must painfully grope for the scraps of useful matter peradventure interspersed.24

Poe shares Minor’s complaint, but his agenda is more precise. Whereas Minor feared for the intellectual and political coherence of the public sphere, Poe’s


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only worry is that literary overproduction will impair the acquisition of “correct information” and other “useful matter.” In other words, Minor addressed a social problem from the standpoint of a citizen-reformer, but Poe confronts a material problem from the more calculating perspective of a producer. In an 1841 review of Lambert Wilmer, Poe reiterated his anxiety over the practical consequences of literary overproduction. Echoing Minor’s calculations of the limits to knowledge, Poe denounces those editors who review books that they haven’t even read. Such an editor, Poe complains, gives the false impression that “he is in the daily habit of critically reading and deciding upon a flood of publications one tenth of whose title-pages he may possibly have turned over, three fourths of whose contents would be Hebrew to his most desperate efforts at comprehension, and whose entire mass and amount, as might be mathematically demonstrated, would be sufficient to occupy, in the most cursory perusal, the attention of some ten or twenty readers for a month!” (ER, 1008). Ignoring the citizen-reader in favor of the commercial writer, Poe again reveals that he was less concerned with social disintegration than with practical impediments to literary production. Nevertheless, Poe sometimes attempted to make a virtue of necessity by devising ways to exploit the rising “flood of publications.” The oblique or wayward glance is in fact perfectly adapted to information-rich environments, for it constitutes an extremely efficient method of skimming useful truths from the surfaces of discourse. In addition, Poe fantasized about a kind of thinker who was still capable of total knowledge, a polymath who was not overwhelmed by literary overproduction but who could actually thrive in a publishing environment saturated by wave after wave of new information. As suggested in Chapter Eight, such fictional polymaths as Morella, Ligeia, and especially Dupin serve as rejoinders to Minor’s thesis about the limits to knowledge, for they all revel in forbidden worlds of promiscuous textuality and endless intellectual delights. Not surprisingly, Poe himself often posed as just such a polymath. At one time or another during his career, he claimed expertise in law, phrenology, landscape gardening, navigation, geology, Hebrew, French, Greek, Latin, cryptography, painting, road-building, natural history, ancient history, aeronautics, political economy, conchology, corkscrews, mathematics, astronomy, Baconian science, religion, music, field sports, and the philosophy of furniture. Poe’s articles on plagiarism imply a similar familiarity with vast accumulations of printed material from all epochs and regions. Since plagiarists tend to “plunder recondite, neglected, or forgotten books” (ER, 718), only a true polymath could detect and expose the innumerable instances of literary theft. Like the claim to total knowledge, Poe’s crusade against plagiarism suggests that he had developed a new epistemology for coping with literary overproduction, an epistemology that contrasts starkly with Minor’s premonition about the waning of total knowledge. In many ways, the commercial writer who denigrated “profundity” and who celebrated

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the truth of surfaces could have wished no greater compliment than to be called “a shallow smatterer.” There was, however, a practical side to Poe’s epistemological break with Minor. It is one thing to evaluate texts as being fit or unfit for a reader with certain tastes and aptitudes; it is something else entirely to translate the limitations of an individual reader into restrictions on literary production in general. By maintaining this latter position, Minor had challenged the economic prospects that depended upon an expanding publishing industry and an expanding mass audience. In 1844, Poe therefore reconsidered the predicament of the commercial writer during times of overproduction. Undoubtedly alluding to Minor’s “Selection in Reading,” Poe claims to have encountered “many computations respecting the greatest amount of erudition attainable by an individual in his lifetime.” Such computations are anathema to the magazinist because they imply a link between the capacity of an individual reader and the growth potential of the mass literary market. Resisting the implications of Minor’s argument, Poe offers a radically different model of the reading process: It is true that, in general, we retain, we remember to available purpose, scarcely one-hundredth part of what we read; yet there are minds which not only retain all receipts, but keep them at compound interest for ever. . . . And, even physically considered, knowledge breeds knowledge, as gold gold; for he who reads really much, finds his capacity to read increase in geometrical ratio.25

In this account, the boundary between reading and capitalism is virtually erased. Attempting to elude the economic power of the publishing industry, Poe imagines a different kind of Capital Reader who was not a mere market analyst but rather a polymath blessed with limitless productivity. Significantly, however, this emphasis on productivity compels Poe to reject the traditional humanism of his day. From the standpoint of Poe’s polymath, knowledge does not culminate in virtue, wisdom, or happiness; instead, knowledge reenters an endlessly expanding process of intellectual production that closely parallels the “ceaseless augmentation” of capitalism itself.26 Responding to both the overproduction of information and the power of the Capital Reader, Poe invents an information-gatherer whose only purpose is to acquire still more information. Poe even goes so far as to project this model of ceaseless augmentation to the heavens. In one of Poe’s angelic dialogues, for example, the veteran angel proclaims: “Ah, not in knowledge is happiness, but in the acquisition of knowledge! In for ever knowing, we are for ever blessed; but to know all were the curse of a fiend” (PT, 822). At nearly every turn, then, Poe rejected the model of literary benevolence epitomized by Lucian Minor and instead adopted an aggressive, commercial view of American mass culture. In his 1835 defense of “Berenice,” Poe surmounted the problem of literary taste by offering an evaluative method based


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upon magazine sales. And when confronted by the difficulty of total knowledge in an age of literary overproduction, Poe speculated about a mind whose comprehension—and productivity—could expand without limit. As suggested above, such speculations reveal Poe’s longstanding desire to turn capital against itself. The comparison between knowledge and gold obviously exemplifies this strategy, for Poe was attempting to set information against the more obvious forms of capital in the publishing industry—printing machinery, warehouse space, paper, labor, and all additional means of production that could be purchased by publishers but not by “poor-devil authors.” In addition, Poe tried to transform fame into literary capital, an approach “rendered necessary by my having no other capital to begin with than whatever reputation I may have acquired as a literary man.”27 When this did not work, he pinned his hopes on breakthroughs in printing technology, which would ostensibly reduce reliance on capital-intensive publishing methods.28 Finally, Poe hoped to circumvent the publishing industry by founding his own magazine, a project that initiated a lifelong quest for “a partner possessing ample capital, and, at the same time, so little self-esteem, as to allow me entire control of the editorial conduct.”29 In order to attract such an unlikely Capital Reader, Poe not only falsified the circulation statistics of the Southern Literary Messenger, but as demonstrated in Chapter Three, he also engaged in a systematic attempt to refashion himself from a romantic outcast into an editorial entrepreneur.30 Taken together, these efforts signaled the emergence of a new kind of culture, one in which all facets of human communication seemed destined to fall under the gaze of the Capital Reader. Poe and the Masses focuses on the political economy of literature in Poe’s day, but the rise of the Capital Reader must also have some consequences for what are, in modern times, two of the reigning forms of literary knowledge. These forms of knowledge have been described in various ways, but for present purposes they may be identified as the extensive, historical, or sociological approaches associated with the interpretive practice of mediation; and the intensive, formalist, or deconstructive approaches associated with the interpretive practice of close reading. Mediation usually concerns the relations between literature and other social phenomena, relations which were of course downplayed by the American New Critics. But the practice of mediation was also rendered problematic by the work of Louis Althusser, who argued for the relative autonomy of economic, political, and ideological “instances” or “levels” of human practice. In the essay “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” Althusser disparages attempts to explain political and ideological practices as the expression or mechanistic reflex of an economic “essence.” Finding problems even with Engels’s claim that cultural forms are determined in the last instance by the economy, Althusser goes on to argue that “the economic dialectic is never active in the pure state. . . . From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes.”31 Whatever Althusser’s

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work may finally mean for the study of culture, in practice his theory of relative autonomy has too often been taken as an à priori truth about social reality instead of something to explore in the course of literary and historical research. Moreover, the hasty disavowal of “determination,” variously understood as mere influence or outright determinism, has led many critics to turn their backs on the material conditions of production. And yet, even a sidelong glance at antebellum America reveals the difficulty of separating literature from the prevailing economic order, and Poe’s explicit acknowledgment of capitalist control further indicates that “relative autonomy” is not guaranteed from the start, but must instead be achieved and maintained through constant struggle. In fact, “Poe” would not even exist for us if the Capital Reader had not summoned him to writing as a viable form of social labor. Those who gaze too closely at literature may presume that the last instance of the Capital Reader never comes, but someone who surveys it less intently knows that for Poe and other commercial writers, the last instance must come first.32 To demonstrate this, I frequently depart from the pure domain of literature and delve into the sprawling materiality of the antebellum publishing industry. Part of my aim is to overturn the abiding presumption that literature is innocent of capitalist determination until proven guilty. Although Poe explicitly described the influence of capitalism over literature, most interpretive approaches fail to account for the uneasy relationship between writers and proprietors; nor do they account for the material conditions that exercised a powerful influence over the making—and therefore the meaning—of even literary texts. The figure of the Capital Reader stands as an admonishment to these approaches because it indicates that the social meaning of Poe’s work is intimately bound up with the political economy of literature. For historicism in general, this implies that the “context” of a literary work has less to do with time and place per se than with the material conditions that constitute the very occasion of writing and that effectively summon the commercial writer into existence. For reader-response criticism, it suggests that attention to a text’s reception, though in some sense enormously important, is in another sense beside the point because the Capital Reader initiates and controls the interaction between audience and author.33 For political criticism, the Capital Reader questions any investigation that focuses exclusively on representations of race, class, or gender. These cannot be neglected, but Poe’s political importance should also be sought in his long struggle with the material necessities of literary production. As I argue in Chapter Five, Poe’s insight into these necessities arose not only from his experiences in a capitalist publishing industry, but especially from his perverse capacity to imagine its full implications, that is, to imagine a world where emergent tendencies have become dominant.34 As to the intensive critical approaches mentioned above, it is perhaps unnecessary to point out that there must be some interpretive dissonance be-


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tween the Capital Reader who determines what texts shall exist and the close reader who determines, almost as an afterthought, what these same texts shall mean. It is likewise unnecessary to emphasize that the intensive approach is today menaced by the same specter that haunted Lucian Minor, namely the specter of cultural overproduction. Close reading has long reigned as the ultimate aim or test of literary study, but in an era of accumulating interpretations, it is only prudent to wonder about their value and durability. In this regard Minor’s complaint assumes a special relevance, raising anew the possibility that an emissary of literary knowledge could be transformed, through sheer overproduction, into an agent of cultural bewilderment. Despite its allure, however, Minor’s call for courageous ignorance seems inadequate to the present crisis; nor would much be gained from uncoordinated slowdowns in the production of theory and criticism. The emergence of new forms of knowledge, after all, seems to require new kinds of knowers who surpass the limitations of the readers heretofore described. This helps to explain why Poe dreamed of readers who “retain all receipts” and “keep them at compound interest for ever,” but in the end not even Poe could escape the crisis of surplus. In much of his critical and fictional writing, Poe in fact implies that the new subject of social knowledge is not a human being at all, but instead a corporate or collective entity whose mere existence imperils traditional notions of literature and literary meaning. Interpretive overproduction, in other words, is yet another manifestation of a longstanding, systemic predicament, and as such it should be taken as a sign that we too subsist in a kind of prehistory of common knowledge, a time when the traditional thinking subject has been displaced by the Capital Reader, and when a genuinely collective subject of social knowledge still waits to be born.

III. OUTLINE OF THE APPROACH To appreciate this predicament, which threatens to turn all literature into minor writing, it is best to begin with basic issues. Poe and the Masses accordingly reopens a number of fundamental questions about the plight of the commercial writer and the complex relationship between American literature and American capitalism. The first part, extending through Chapter Four, reconstructs the ensemble of everyday pressures that influenced commercial writers in the United States. Chapter Two considers the totality of social and economic conditions that comprised Poe’s publishing environment. I pay special attention to two aspects of this totality: the power of economic forces to influence the thoughts, feelings, and creativity of commercial writers; and the antagonistic relation between commercial writers and the capitalist publishing industry. This chapter also explores the implications for cultural studies of positing information as a means of production rather than as an article of

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(individual) consumption. Chapter Three investigates Poe’s lifelong attempt to found a magazine of his own. With the aid of payment lists that had been lost or completely overlooked, I compile the first reliable data on Poe’s effectiveness as a literary entrepreneur. I then use this data to show how Poe falsified statistics and refashioned his public image in a desperate bid to regain control over his intellectual labor. Seen in this light, Poe’s struggle to establish his own magazine accords perfectly with his fantasy of a material language that could not be censored by the Capital Reader. Chapter Four explores Poe’s complex response to the vaguely ominous mass audience and to the social conflicts over literary value. After reviewing the rise of the information metropolis, this chapter focuses on the crucial contradiction between Poe’s practical understanding of a divided audience and his theoretical insistence on a unified aesthetic effect. In many ways, this contradiction anticipates the detective tale, which responds to the discordant city by positing a culture of surfaces that can be “read” by detectives (and perhaps by other entrepreneurial intellectuals). But the primary aim of this chapter is to explore the relation between material context and literary creation. Thus a dense or ambiguous style, associated with so many writers of the period, may be seen as a necessary response to the divided audience of virtual readers, especially since two of them—the Capital Reader and the mass reader—were historically new influences on literature. In Chapters Five through Eight, I extend these ideas by addressing some of the most controversial issues in Poe’s life and work. Chapter Five (“Average Racism”) reevaluates the political predicament of commercial writers by constructing a comprehensive account of Poe’s response to American slavery. Based upon relatively scanty evidence, some modern critics have recently branded Poe as a blatant racist. Aside from obscuring the real history of racism and slavery, such perfunctory denunciations ignore Poe’s persistent attempt to expel politics from the literary commodity as a means to ensure national marketability. Some readers may be scandalized by the results of this attempt at historical accuracy, but my larger purpose is to lay the groundwork for an investigation of the politics that mattered most to Poe, namely the politics of production. Chapter Six (“Subtle Barbarians”) builds upon this foundation to show how sublime and scientific literatures are, in different ways, implicated in broader national struggles over domestic slavery and foreign imperialism. At issue here is not only the racial meaning of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym but also the strange complicity between a literary form such as the exploration narrative and the development of a more or less uniform capitalist economy. Deeply concerned with the rise of information as a form of capital, Poe recognized how scientific information contributed to industrial development, and he also understood how exploration narratives promoted the acquisition of western lands and the creation of new markets throughout the world. In his hoaxes of such narratives, however, Poe awakens and then repeatedly frustrates the desire for useful knowledge, and in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon


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Pym, he elevates the withholding or endless deferral of information into a veritable principle of structure. In contrast to the political Poe that some have described, the creator of Pym betrays a thoroughly corrosive imagination that would make him an unreliable ally of any cause or social class. The next two chapters investigate specific manifestations of the rise of a mass culture in antebellum America. Chapter Seven, focusing on the bestselling tale “The Gold-Bug,” demonstrates how Poe transformed a method of concealing information (cryptography) into a device for selling “without sympathy” to an anonymous mass audience. In the course of this chapter I decode a cryptograph that raises questions about Poe’s attempt to obtain a patronage job in the presidential administration of John Tyler. But my larger purpose is to unravel the tangled relations among capitalism, cryptography, and the rise of a mass culture in antebellum America. Chapter Eight (“Culture of Surfaces”) explores the origin of the detective story, the literary genre Poe is credited with inventing. Disputing the Darwinian theory of literary evolution espoused by Franco Moretti and others, I argue that the tale of ratiocination represents Poe’s most profound response to the transformation of the publishing industry and the birth of a vaguely ominous mass audience. Like the literary hoax, the tale of ratiocination imitates dominant discourses without delivering any profitable information. Unlike the hoax, however, the detective tale foregrounds the predicament of intellectuals who must negotiate between the power of capital and the degraded or unfathomable taste of the mass reader. This chapter concludes with a discussion of “The Purloined Letter” and the crucial difference between literature and information. Regardless of what it may have meant to the Queen, the stolen letter retains its power only so long as its contents remain secret. By the inner logic of both the tale and the emerging relations of production, information would lose all value the instant it became common knowledge. In the concluding chapter I show how such contradictions inspired the fantasy of a material language propounded in “The Power of Words,” the last of Poe’s angelic dialogues. According to Poe’s angels, the material world bears the “impression” of even the slightest motion, so that the stars constitute a vast library of all that was ever said or done. Aside from interpreting “The Power of Words” in the context of Poe’s economic predicament, I show how this fantasy derives from the writings of Charles Babbage, who was not only a mathematician and economist but also the inventor of the first primitive computer or “difference engine.” The latter achievement, almost forgotten and then rediscovered in the twentieth century, is largely responsible for Babbage’s current reputation as progenitor of the modern computer era. In many ways, Babbage’s computer accords perfectly with Poe’s collection of new thinking entities, ranging from investigating polymaths to corporate readers to the literate masses. But Babbage’s presence also illustrates the way that Poe tried to set one sort of materialism against another. That is, from his protracted struggle with

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the socioeconomic conditions of the antebellum publishing industry, Poe developed an acute sensitivity to the influence of matter (economic forces) over mind (artistic creation). Against this economic materialism, which emphasizes social relations, Poe invoked a tradition of philosophical materialism stretching from Epicurus to the dawn of modern science, a tradition emphasizing the physical world as a kind of ultimate, unsurpassable reality. Poe’s dalliance with materialism was probably no more sincere than his dabbling with science, but he must have found comfort in Babbage’s speculations about the signifying universe. As a commercial writer, Poe needed the aid of publishers and investors to bring a text into material existence, but according to Babbage’s theory, the universe itself enables unfettered artistic creation by retaining the material traces of every word ever spoken. Taking advantage of this cosmology, Poe uses “The Power of Words” to revisit the central issues of his economic predicament: the nature of the supreme reader, the limits to production, the problem of overproduction, the permanence of art, the power of information, and the transmutation of earthly pain into supernal beauty. The link between “The Power of Words” and the information age—written, as it were, on the cope of heaven—completes the case for Poe’s representative status, both as a literary innovator and as the portent of an emerging mass culture. Ranging from minor writing to the stars, our wayward glance has revealed a number of crucial changes in the republic of letters: the public intellectual transformed into a commercial writer; the literary creation recast as a textual commodity; and taste superseded by circulation as a measure of literary value. Some of these changes can be detected in the work of earlier authors, but Poe seems to have viewed the new literary environment as a fait accompli, and his work—like Babbage’s universe—constitutes a material record of the emergent publishing industry. Far from being a privileged or insulated realm of production, this industry was in many ways the harbinger of a new economic order, and those who labored for the Capital Reader were in a position to feel its full onslaught and to divine its deepest contradictions. The link between specific texts and specific social conditions requires further investigation, but there should be little doubt of a presumptive complicity between capitalism and literature in antebellum America. Nor should there be any doubt that this complicity would force authors into a new and uneasy relationship with the common readers who were the final target of the expanding literary market. The following chapters therefore explore both the productive relations which determined Poe’s writing, and the literate masses whom he saw out of the corner of his eye, ominously congregating on the horizon of meaning.

Chapter Two THE HORRID LAWS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY The brilliancies on any one page of Lalla Rookh would have sufficed to establish that very reputation which has been in a great measure self-dimmed by the galaxied lustre of the entire book. It seems that the horrid laws of political economy cannot be evaded even by the inspired, and that a perfect versification, a vigorous style, and a never-tiring fancy, may, like the water we drink and die without, yet despise, be so plentifully set forth as to be absolutely of no value at all. (Edgar Allan Poe, 1841)1

I. THINKING MATERIAL

W

RITING BEFORE the Great Depression had cast a shadow over previous economic calamities, R. C. McGrane ranked the Panic of 1837 as one of the most severe crises in American history. According to McGrane, the panic “marked the close of one epoch in our industrial history, and the beginning of a new era. It engulfed all classes and all phases of economic life within its toils; and for seven long years the people of this land struggled to free themselves from its oppression.”2 As illustrated by his personal and professional struggles, Edgar Allan Poe was also entangled in this web of economic distress. Frequently forced to beg for loans and to perform literary hack work, Poe understood better than most the “sad poverty & the thousand consequent contumelies & other ills which the condition of the mere Magazinist entails upon him in America—where more than in any other region upon the face of the globe to be poor is to be despised.”3 Unfortunately, many attempts to interpret the literature of this period assume that “culture” and “capitalism” designate realms that are somehow discrete or even autonomous. But if Poe is correct in claiming that “the horrid laws of political economy cannot be evaded even by the inspired,” then any study of antebellum literature must consider the totality of economic and ideological pressures affecting those who signify in the course of social labor. In what follows, I emphasize two aspects of this totality: (1) the power of economic forces to influence the thoughts, feelings, and creativity of all workers, including commercial writers; and (2) the complex relation between commercial writers and the various embodiments of capital in the publishing industry and the expanding U.S. economy. During the period in question, these embodiments of capital

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included printing machinery, transportation networks, commercial information, technical data, and even that grist for intellectual labor which Poe called “thinking material.” In order to explore the rich interplay between historical environment and the creations of an ostensibly separate imagination, it is therefore necessary to go beyond the biographical concern with mere intimacy, especially the obsessive fascination with the intimate details of Poe’s psychic and emotional life. Since I cannot hope to vanquish this obsession altogether, I shall instead attempt to redirect it with a new and perhaps scandalous proposition, namely that from the standpoint of the commercial writer, nothing is more intimate than production. In antebellum America, cultural upheaval and industrialization were accompanied by the emergence of information as an acknowledged instrument of economic development. Poe witnessed this emergence as the ward of John Allan, a Richmond merchant whose business required him to maintain a vigilant quest for the most recent commercial information about world commodity markets. The mercantile firm headed by John Allan and Charles Ellis traded not only in tobacco but also in wheat, hay, corn meal, teas and coffees, cloth, clothing of all kinds, seeds, liquor, and tombstones.4 As if to round out Poe’s economic education, John Allan moved the entire family to England in 1815, where they spent five years observing the instabilities of what was then the most advanced industrial nation on earth. Attempting to rebuild his business after the War of 1812 and the Napoleonic wars, Allan was confronted with famine, economic depression, and a host of social ills: Every nation is endeavouring by salutary restrictions & in many cases interdictions to encourage their own manufactories which operates severely on this great Manufacturing Kingdom . . . thousands that depended upon this work for support are thrown out of employ or are working for wages barely sufficient to keep soul & body together. Taxes heavy, debt large. People discontented & desperate, Revenue falling off & scarcely a hope left of relieving the one or providing for the other. The Prince’s Carriage was attacked with stones.5

In his sweeping description of the British economic crisis, Allan shifts easily from trade restrictions to the English working class to the prince’s carriage. Grasping the connection between political and economic conditions, Allan told his correspondent that “you can have no idea of the distresses of this country since the termination of that long Contest which in its continuance had drenched Europe with blood.” For him, these were not idle remarks, but pivotal observations whose accuracy would determine the success or failure of his business. Like other merchants of the time, John Allan sought out information about all manner of social phenomena and then meticulously analyzed these phenomena for their potential impact on trade and economic development. Young Edgar Poe was therefore introduced to political economy as an

T H E H O R R I D L AW S O F P O L I T I C A L E C O N O M Y

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urgent, all-encompassing discourse with distinctive terms, assumptions, and interpretive methods. Even without his English education, Poe could scarcely have ignored the emergence of capitalism as a world system. Nor could his Southern upbringing blind him to this emergence, especially when one recalls that he was the natural child of itinerant actors and that John Allan was in fact a Scottish immigrant. The city of Richmond, moreover, was itself unusual as a site of manufacturing within a plantation economy. In addition to tobacco factories employing 655 workers, many of them slaves, Richmond had iron foundries, sawmills, nail factories, and, just up the James River, huge deposits of bituminous coal which, throughout Poe’s adolescence, captured a greater share of foreign and domestic markets than Pennsylvania anthracite.6 In 1824, when Poe was attending school in the city, one visitor complained of an atmosphere “impregnated with the dense murky effluvia of coal smoke, which begrimes the pores of the skin, and affects respiration.”7 More penetrating than coal smoke was the language of commerce. Just as it enabled the exchange and therefore the equivalence of all manner of commodities, the firm of Ellis & Allan facilitated a sordid intermingling of different forms and traditions of signification. Thus the brother of Charles Ellis could write, in a single sentence, that “Mr. Were has returned the horse we sold him saying he was lame and too small, Brother Joshua was married on the 3rd. instant., all your hogs are disposed of except 3,” and dinner conversation at the Allan household could similarly include sailing yarns, remarks on the low price of flax in Lisbon, speculations about Bonaparte’s most recent campaigns, and hard talk about the price of tobacco on the Liverpool market (Israfel, 27–28). Those who did business with the firm were just as inclined to commingle the prosaic with the sublime. A Williamsburg customer, for example, submitted the following request by mail: “Send me by the first opportunity Paley’s moral philosophy, Cavallo on electricity and a hat. . . . the enclosed string is the size that I wish the hat to be.”8 According to Poe’s earliest memories, then, literature was not insulated from the marketplace but was instead one commodity among a multitude of others. As a boy, Poe in fact spent long hours on the second floor of the Ellis & Allan establishment, where in addition to books there was a collection of such popular periodicals as the Edinburgh Review, Blackwood’s, and the London Ladies’ Magazine.9 He also spent much time downstairs, working as a messenger and dry-goods clerk for the firm; in all likelihood John Allan entertained notions that Poe would embark on a mercantile career of his own some day. But regardless of whether commerce comprised a potential career or merely a formative environment for Poe, its logic and terminology pervaded all manner of cultural practices. John Allan once again serves to illustrate the predominance of political economy, for he maintained his commercial sensibility (and vocabulary) even when

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discussing great works of literature. In 1814, for example, Allan told one correspondent of his envy for Shakespeare’s literary talent. According to Allan, if he had possessed such talent, he would have been able to “make something” out of his diverse experiences: “Gods! what would I not give, if I had his talent for writing! and what use would I not make of the raw material at my command!”10 Ten years later, in keeping with this aspiration, Allan seized the sheet of paper containing Poe’s earliest known poetry, turned it upside down, and used it to make business calculations.11 He figured better than he knew. As we shall see, Poe was indeed transformed into a strange synthesis of art and commerce, a poet turned upside down by the forces of financial crisis. A convenient introduction to the crisis can be found in the newspaper, that lowliest of literary commodities. Both symbol and product of the new publishing industry, the newspaper combined different forms of meaning into a single package that could be disseminated to a great mass of readers. The first successful penny newspaper, the New York Sun, was founded in 1833; after the Panic of 1837, the cheap dailies and weeklies began to undercut the magazine and book trade. Importantly, newspapers at this time aspired to become a complete reading package by printing both news and what we today call literature. In 1839, for example, the New York Tattler carried Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby in sixteen installments. Of greater importance were the mammoth weeklies, which frequently printed entire novels in the form of “extras.” Due to the massive size of the newspaper page, whole books could be printed on two or three sheets, a capability which American weeklies like Brother Jonathan and the New World were quick to exploit, especially when they could obtain pirated editions of English works. In 1842 the New World put out twenty-one extras; in 1843 it published thirty-six. This competition, as well as the general financial panic, had a devastating effect on the book trade. During the 1820s books sold for an average of $2.00; during the depression of 1837–1843, they sold for fifty cents.12 The magazines also suffered. As editor of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, Poe was forced to inform fellow writers that “the intense pressure has obliged Mr. B. with nearly, if not every, publisher of the country, to discontinue paying for contributions” (Letters, 1:121–22). Beyond its immediate impact on the market, the panic had several profound repercussions. Among other things, according to Poe, the new social and economic conditions were compelling people to “put the greatest amount of thought in the smallest compass and disperse it with the utmost attainable rapidity” (ER, 1377). Shockwaves of the panic could even be detected in the seemingly remote domain of literary form. The emergence of new forms such as the detective tale will be discussed in Chapter Eight, but for now it should be noted that the panic made Poe painfully aware of the need to satisfy both elite and common readers with a single text. As he remarks in a review of Charles James Lever, “A book may be readily sold, may be univer-


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sally read, for the sake of some half or two-thirds of its matter, which half or two-thirds may be susceptible of popular appreciation, while the one-half or one-third remaining may be the delight of the highest intellect and genius, and absolute caviar to the rabble.” In the face of this mixed audience, the “writer of fiction, who looks most sagaciously to his own interest, [will] combine all votes by intermingling with his loftier efforts such amount of less ethereal matter as will give general currency to his composition” (ER, 312). After 1843, new postal regulations and financial recovery helped to reduce— slightly—the pressure to write for a single homogeneous mass market.13 The depression nevertheless represented a period of combined and uneven development in the publishing environment, one that seemed to herald a fundamental and irreversible change in writing itself. The Panic of 1837 therefore sharpened Poe’s understanding of the relation between literary production and production in general. As an editor and reviewer, he frequently stressed the commercial utility of the periodical press. For Poe, Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine indicated, more than any other single publication, the range of information which merchant capitalists required in order to do business in a world market. Attempting to fill up the columns of the Broadway Journal, he often listed the entire table of contents of the latest issue of the Merchants’ Magazine: “The Value and Prospects of Life in the United States—The Cotton Trade—The System of Mutual Insurance examined with Reference to the Question of Individual Liability—Maritime Law, Piracy and Financiering—Electricity as the Cause of Storms—The March of Our Republic—The Consular System—Pot and Pearl Ashes—and The Progress of Population in Boston. Besides these papers we have Mercantile Law Cases—Commercial Chronicle—Commercial Regulations, etc. etc.—and several pages of judicious literary criticism.” The variety of these articles, like the variety of conversation topics at the Allan table, indicates the mercantile tendency to translate all existing discourses into the language of commerce. Significantly, Poe praised the Merchants’ Magazine for its profitability to Hunt himself and its value to “the influential class” of capitalists who subscribed to it, traits which made the magazine “one of the most useful of our monthly journals, and decidedly the best ‘property’ of any work” of its kind.14 But although Poe commended the Merchants’ Magazine for its commercial utility, he continued to remark upon the greater social impact of the penny press. In an 1846 article on Richard Adams Locke, for example, Poe describes the plan of the New York Sun to supply “the public with news of the day at so cheap a rate as to lie within the means of all.” According to Poe, “the consequences of the scheme, in their influence on the whole newspaper business of the country, and through this business on the interests of the country at large, are probably beyond all calculation” (ER, 1214). For Poe, however, nothing was beyond calculation. As indicated in Chapter One, by 1835 he had already begun to measure the value of a tale by its

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effect on circulation; shortly thereafter, he started to conceive of information as a kind of raw material for literary production. In his “Pinakidia,” collected for the August 1836 Southern Literary Messenger, Poe playfully discusses compilations with such titles as “Random Thoughts” or “Material for Thinking.” Though the public generally fails to appreciate their worth, these collections possess “rich interest and value” for other writers. “In papers of this nature may be found,” Poe wryly remarks, “a collective mass of general, but more usually of classical erudition, which, if dexterously besprinkled over a proper surface of narrative, would be sufficient to make the fortunes of one or two hundred ordinary novelists.”15 Through its satirical commentary, “Pinakidia” reveals two aspects of Poe’s changing attitude toward the material basis of literary production. First, Poe’s jocular allusion to “one or two hundred ordinary novelists” suggests his anxiety about the growing army of intellectual workers who churn out texts without much hope of attaining wealth or fame. Second, Poe reveals the demystifying, materialist approach to literary production that would ultimately culminate in such articles as “The Philosophy of Composition” and “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House.” But whereas these later pieces focus on the process or profits of literary production, “Pinakidia,” considers the nature and function of the thinking material itself. As demonstrated by the collection that comprises the bulk of the article, thinking material consists of small, manageable bits of meaning that have been wrested or stolen from some earlier work.16 When it comes to the issue of value, however, the thinking material leads a curious double life. Although the information may be consumed for entertainment, its real value lies in the fact that it may be productively consumed by another writer in the process of creating a new text. For Poe, commercial writing was a form of production that derived its raw material not from divine inspiration, experience, or a discrete literary tradition, but instead from the whole jumbled mass of information that had been accumulating from ancient times down to the present moment. The labor of adding value to preexistent matter led Poe beyond the relatively simple logic of John Allan’s merchant capitalism, which taught that profits were derived from buying low and selling dear. In Poe’s view, commercial writing was modeled less on the mercantile firm than on the new urban workshops and factories. Although literary production still involved buying and selling, Poe realized that the moment of exchange had penetrated inward to corrupt or regulate the labor process itself. In his satires, Poe accordingly depicts the modern writer not as an inspired creator, but as a dim-witted drudge who extracts and reassembles phrases selected randomly from previously published texts. In “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.,” for example, the title character begins his poetic career by splicing together passages from Dante, Shakespeare, and Homer; when called upon to do critical hatchet work under the pseudonym of Thomas Hawk, Thingum Bob employs a more arbitrary method of cutting, mixing and


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pasting. These same compositional methods appear in “How to Write a Blackwood Article.” There, the ambitious narrator (Psyche Zenobia) discovers that political articles are produced by splicing together random passages from the Times, the Examiner, and Gulley’s New Compendium of Slang-Whang. Zenobia also learns the importance of “filling up” her writing: “By casting your eye down on almost any page of any book in the world, you will be able to perceive at once a host of little scraps of either learning or bel-esprit-ism, which are the very thing for the spicing of a Blackwood article” (PT, 283). The “scraps” fall into two categories: “Piquant Expressions” and, more tellingly, “Piquant Facts for the Manufacture of Similes” (284). These satires dramatize what Poe merely implies in “Pinakidia.” In a vision that is both comic and dystopian, Poe anticipates the industrialization of literature and the writer’s growing dependence on raw material, which must be acquired and processed like any other capital good. It is therefore erroneous to assume that Poe’s sketch “The Business Man” was his “only literary reaction to the depression.”17 Above and beyond mere narrative representations, Poe responded to the panic—and to capitalism in general—by developing a new epistemology for information-rich environments and by satirizing the emerging conditions of the publishing industry. As explained at greater length in Chapters Three and Eight, he also responded by refashioning himself into an editorial entrepreneur and by inventing new literary forms. These responses challenge many contemporary versions of literary history, ranging from descriptions which imply that a historical context is simpler and more accessible than the literary work itself, to the more recent but no longer scandalous proclamation that history is accessible to us only as a text. At best, such claims serve as starting points for critical investigations of literature and history; at worst, they serve as alibis for avoiding the material conditions of literary production. As a first step toward material history, it is necessary to take seriously what Poe expressed partly in jest, namely that all writers are subject to the laws of political economy. This realization led Poe to consider the full ramifications of the material conditions of production. As demonstrated in the next section, the economic crisis in literature inspired some of Poe’s deepest meditations on politics and society.

II. POE’S POLITICS Against the traditional view of Poe as solitary genius, there have been, especially since the 1930s, several attempts to portray him in a wider social and historical context. Not surprisingly, these attempts to historicize Poe tend to falter in the face of Poe’s own ahistorical diatribes against democracy and human perfectibility.18 To be sure, Poe did occasionally disparage movements for social reform, and like Lucian Minor—who was generally an advocate of

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reform—he worried about the dangers of literary overproduction. Unlike Minor, however, Poe could not endorse any solutions that called for a more measured rate of cultural change, especially if this involved restricted employment prospects for commercial writers and editors. Nor could he afford any permanent estrangement from the prevailing ideology of progress. Contrary to common assumptions, Poe did advocate a number of progressive reforms, but as his career wore on, he concentrated his political energies on the very specialized realm of literary production. In Poe’s view, “progress” in the publishing industry meant expanded audiences, improved education, federal funding for expeditionary voyages, more rapid distribution of commodities, cheaper printing technologies, better copyright protection, faster rates of reading, and above all, freedom from the economic dominance of capitalist proprietors. There is nevertheless some truth to the characterization of Poe as an artist who held himself distant from the fray of partisan politics. Indeed, given his everyday contact with campaigns and the partisan press, one would expect his life and writings to betray a greater degree of political involvement. He was raised in the capital of Virginia, in a household that paid close attention to governmental affairs. He also lived in London, studied at the University of Virginia, served in the U. S. Army, and attended West Point. After his courtmartial in 1831, Poe took up residence in Baltimore, the third largest city in the country and a site of political as well as commercial ferment. In that year William Wirt, whom Poe knew personally, was nominated as the presidential candidate on the Anti-Masonic slate; in the following year both Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay were nominated in Baltimore by their respective parties. Between 1841 and 1843, Poe even tried to obtain a patronage appointment in the presidential administration of John Tyler. As demonstrated in Chapter Seven, however, this patronage quest— motivated primarily by poverty—was hampered by Poe’s political naivete and ineptness. Consider the letter to his friend Frederick W. Thomas, a Whig officeholder who had inspired Poe with glowing descriptions of government work: Do you seriously think that an application on my part to Tyler would have a good result? My claims, to be sure, are few. I am a Virginian—at least I call myself one, for I have resided all my life, until within the last few years, in Richmond. My political principles have always been as nearly as may be, with the existing administration, and I battled with right good will for Harrison, when the opportunity offered. With Mr. Tyler I have some slight personal acquaintance—although this is a matter which he has possibly forgotten. For the rest, I am a literary man—and I see a disposition in government to cherish letters. Have I any chance? (Letters, 1:170).

This professed support for the Harrison-Tyler ticket has often been viewed as a sign of Poe’s Whig tendencies. To a zealous political activist like Thomas, however, the letter must have seemed a tepid and awkward declaration of


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principles. Thomas decided to support the patronage quest, but he was never certain of Poe’s true colors. In fact, just two years after recommending him for Whig patronage, Thomas again inquired about his friend’s political sympathies, only this time he wondered whether Poe harbored “right good will” for the Democratic administration of James K. Polk: What are your politics? Are you friendly to the powers that be—they seem to be partial to literary men, at least of their own persuasion—I wish you were in a secure office—I nurse the hope, notwithstanding my disappointment, that you may one of these days be so placed in office as to have a handsome support with leisure to exercise your pen—My notions are that if the government won’t give us an international copyright law, she should take care of her literary men.19

Thomas, in other words, suspected that Poe could accommodate himself to either a Whig or a Democratic administration. This view of Poe’s negative political capability, it should be emphasized, derived primarily from Poe himself, who took pains to fashion himself as a politically neutral author. In an 1844 letter to Thomas H. Chivers, for example, Poe disavowed partisan politics altogether: “I am not aware what are your political views. My own have reference to no one of the present parties” (Letters, 1:215). This may simply be a diplomatic disclaimer, but given the bulk of Poe’s writings, it is remarkable that he had so little to say about the most pressing political issues of the day. The absence of sustained political commentary is especially important, for it suggests that his scattered political remarks may have been repeated slogans rather than deeply considered convictions.20 His writings are not, of course, completely devoid of political allusions. In his satires, he frequently ridicules the promises of politicians or, more broadly, the possibility of progress through the gradual diffusion of the democratic spirit. In “The Man That Was Used Up,” for example, Poe ruthlessly takes apart “war heroes” who become political candidates, and in “Some Words with a Mummy” he whiggishly mocks Jacksonian democracy through an allegorical description of Egyptian history: Thirteen Egyptian provinces determined all at once to be free, and to set a magnificent example to the rest of mankind. . . . The thing ended, however, in the consolidation of the thirteen states, with some fifteen or twenty others, into the most odious and insupportable despotism that was ever heard of upon the face of the earth. I asked what was the name of the usurping tyrant. As well as the Count could recollect, it was Mob.

By the end of the tale, it is apparent that the Mummy’s words apply all too well to contemporary conditions. “I am heartily sick of this life and of the nineteenth century in general,” concludes the narrator, “I am convinced that everything is going wrong.” It is conventional to attribute these pessimistic sentiments to Poe himself. For additional proof, many critics refer to an 1844

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letter to James Russell Lowell, where Poe remarks, “I have no faith in human perfectibility. Man is now only more active—not more happy—nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago” (Letters, 1:256). The general context of the statement, however, suggests that Poe was fashioning himself as a romantic poet rather than divulging his deepest convictions. Elsewhere in the letter, for example, Poe asserts that “I am not ambitious,” that “I live continually in a reverie of the future,” and, most revealingly, that There are epochs when any kind of mental exercise is torture, and when nothing yields me pleasure by solitary communion with the “mountains & the woods”—the “altars” of Byron. I have thus rambled and dreamed away whole months, and awake, at last, to a sort of mania for composition. (Letters, 1:256)

In other words, Poe affects an aloofness toward schemes of human perfectibility as part of a larger effort to portray himself as an impractical and somewhat tragic romantic visionary. Though others took him seriously, Poe certainly understood that he was merely striking a pose. In the “Philosophy of Composition,” he in fact ridicules the notion that poets compose during fits of “fine frenzy,” and as I demonstrate in the next chapter, Poe’s magazine project impelled him to exchange the image of the romantic outcast for that of the editorial entrepreneur. Poe’s aversion to party politics should likewise be seen as a combination of sentiment and strategy. In many ways his apolitical stance was a response to the rise of Jacksonian Democracy and especially Jacksonian political rhetoric. Andrew Jackson, who began his presidency when Poe was nineteen and ended it when Poe was twenty-seven, rode the crest of a populist swell by repeatedly affirming the rights of the multitude and the wisdom of the common (white) man. George Bancroft, who discussed American history with Poe in 1836, aptly summarized Jacksonian ideology when he wrote, “The many are more sagacious, more disinterested, more courageous than the few.”21 Poe no doubt felt some distaste for such views; as will be demonstrated in Chapter Four, he developed his concept of genius partly in response to these prevalent assumptions about the collective wisdom of the multitude. Ultimately, however, Poe was less interested in impugning such assumptions than in displaying or celebrating his own neutrality. In an article on etiquette, for example, Poe claims that one should “never talk politics at a dinner table nor in a drawing room.”22 In his 1843 review of R. H. Horne, Poe extends this principle to poetry: “We must object, too, to the personal and political allusions—to the Corn-Law question, for example—to Wellington’s statue, &c. These things, of course, have no business in a poem.”23 Poe’s avoidance of partisan politics was perhaps a legacy of the business protocol he learned from John Allan. Allan, ever mindful of impediments to commerce, warned young William Galt, Jr., about the dangers of mixing business and politics: “you recollect you are to have no Political Opinions, as you go to America as one of its foster Sons it is but right


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you should be neuter. . . . [P]rudence dictates that you should not say anything about the Government, but the best is to let Politics alone altogether” (Poe Log, 33). No doubt Allan gave similar advice to his own foster son, but even in the absence of paternal instruction, Poe would have learned to “let Politics alone” when he entered the magazine business. The prospectus for the Southern Literary Messenger promised that “Party Politics and controversial Theology, as far as possible,” would be “jealously excluded,” and some years later, Poe’s co-editor at the Broadway Journal warned about the dangers of embracing “horrifying because unprofitable doctrines.”24 Poe’s relative silence about slavery, examined at length in Chapter Five, is perhaps the ultimate manifestation of Poe’s allegiance to literary neutrality, although some may see this as an allegiance to nothing. Nevertheless, Poe’s aversion to “Party Politics” should not be construed as an aversion to politics altogether. Despite efforts to insulate literature from political affairs, most cultural practices were in some way influenced by the so-called “American System” of a national bank, protective tariffs, and federally subsidized internal improvements, all of which were supposed to stimulate rapid economic development.25 Educational institutions were central to this project because they served as both transmitters and material beneficiaries of the new progressive ideology. As a member of the working press, Poe was well aware of the importance attributed to education and development. In the New-York Mirror, for example, Poe’s “Raven” was followed by an article extolling the latest version of the American System: The disposition of a large amount of public lands for the purposes of internal improvements and education in the States which they are located, will promote the moral, social, and commercial progress of the nation, and must, therefore, meet the cordial support of every patriotic and philanthropic statesman.26

In Poe’s view as well, education deserved the same support as canals and railroads. Disagreeing with the position taken by William Wirt, Poe in 1836 endorsed state financing of institutions such as the University of Virginia because of their “efficacy in the instruction of the mass of mankind” (ER, 982). Significantly, such endorsements allied Poe with Lucian Minor’s attempts to encourage social and cultural progress in the South. In his “Letters from New England,” for example, Minor had urged the South to overcome its backwardness and inefficiency by learning from its northern neighbors. Later, in his “Address on Education,” Minor politely criticized the “present condition of mental culture in Virginia” and argued that the state should emulate New York’s district school system.27 Poe had no difficulty supporting such proposals. In his review of the education address, Poe even went so far as to transform Minor’s mild rhetoric into a radical manifesto: We sincerely wish—nay, we even confidently hope, that words so full of warning, and at the same time so pregnant with truth, may succeed in stirring up something

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akin to action in the legislative halls of the land. Indeed there is no time to squander in speculation. The most lukewarm friend of the State must perceive—if he perceives any thing—that the glory of the Ancient Dominion is in a fainting—is in a dying condition. Her once great name is becoming, in the North, a bye-word for imbecility—all over the South, a type for “the things that have been.” And tamely to ponder upon times gone by is not to meet the exigencies of times present or to come. Memory will not help us. The recollection of our former high estate will not benefit us. Let us act. While we have a resource let us make it of avail. Let us proceed, at once, to the establishment throughout the country, of district schools.28

Since White had agreed to print Minor’s address separately as a pamphlet, Poe’s review was doing double duty as an advertisement, and this may account for some of his enthusiasm. It is also possible that Poe’s performance was inspired by an unspoken rivalry with Minor, who was White’s first choice for the editorship of the Messenger. Nevertheless, this outburst demonstrates that Poe was fully able to play the part of progressive intellectual, especially when the public cause inflamed his private imagination. To a great extent, of course, Poe’s very livelihood depended upon public causes. The new magazine industry owed its existence to the so-called transportation revolution, for without improvements in roads, canals, and especially railroads, neither texts nor other commodities could have achieved general circulation. As George Rogers Taylor has demonstrated, the transportation revolution was accompanied by “equally drastic improvements in communication.”29 In 1844, Poe wryly described the emerging infrastructure as a means to distribute both uninformed bodies and disembodied information: In modern times the discovery of the omnibus dates after that of the steam-boat, and before that of the magnetic telegraph. All three are united in a great cause, either the rapid conveyance of persons or ideas; the two first, however, frequently carrying persons without ideas, and the last being strictly confined, thusfar, to carrying ideas without persons.30

At other moments, Poe was somewhat more enthusiastic about the revolution in transportation and communications. In his 1844 letter to Charles Anthon, for example, Poe claims to have foreseen that “the country, from its very constitution, could not fail of affording . . . a larger proportionate amount of readers than any upon the earth,” and that “the whole energetic, busy spirit of the age tended to the Magazine literature” (Letters, 1:268). And in 1845, perhaps out of annoyance with the condition of New York City streets, Poe wrote a long article on road-building which was intended to promote “an art of so vast an importance.”31 In other cases of public advocacy, Poe demonstrated his talent for translating between politics and political economy. Although he sometimes affected a Romantic disdain for utility, Poe nevertheless understood that the publish-


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ing industry was dedicated to further capitalist development and to the information needs of a burgeoning capitalist class. At times, he even emphasized the economic benefits of various projects to accumulate and disseminate scientific knowledge. In August 1836, for example, a proposed South Sea expedition captured Poe’s imagination by suggesting a correlation between general economic development and progress in the means of communication. Poe joined the cause with a rare enthusiasm for the collective good: It is our duty, holding as we do a high rank in the scale of nations, to contribute a large share to that aggregate of useful knowledge, which is the common property of all. . . . In building up the fabric of commercial prosperity, let us not filch the corner stone. Let it not be said of us, in future ages, that we ingloriously availed ourselves of a stock of scientific knowledge, to which we had not contributed our quota. (ER, 1232)

Poe goes on to quote explorer Jeremiah N. Reynolds, who was then urging Congress and the Jackson administration to augment “the great mass of information that previous ages and other nations have brought to our hands.”32 Echoing Reynolds as he had previously echoed Minor, Poe describes scientific information as the “cornerstone” to commercial development which, for the sake of utility and national honor, should be subsidized by the federal government. Once again, however, it is important to recall Poe’s negative political capability, a capability that varied according to context and genre. In “Sonnet—To Science,” for example, Poe repeats the romantic protest against technological change, assailing science as a vulture who feeds upon “the poet’s heart” and then takes flight on wings of “dull realities” (PT, 38). In such tales as “The Balloon-Hoax” and “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall,” Poe treats science as the pretext for a series of pranks, hoaxes, and ludicrous adventures. Moreover, Poe and Reynolds may have had an ulterior motive for their praise of science and their sober advocacy of an expeditionary voyage to the South Seas. As I shall discuss in Chapter Six, Poe and Reynolds were intrigued by Symmes’s fanciful theory of a hollow earth with openings at the poles, and in all likelihood both men were eager to satisfy their curiosity at government expense. Such incidents contradict the image of Poe as a conservative Southerner. For reasons mentioned above, it is often difficult to fathom Poe’s true political sentiments, but there were numerous occasions when he advocated governmental intervention in the economy and other methods of promoting social progress. In 1840, for example, Poe had an opportunity to reconsider the commercial utility of scientific knowledge. Inspired by a recent article in the Southern Literary Messenger, Poe discussed a proposal to construct a Central School of Natural Science. The review, along with other short pieces by Poe, appeared in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine as part of a regular series called “A Chapter on Science and Art.” (The “Chapter” looks very much like a

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“Pinakidia” for science lovers.) Poe’s commentary follows the pattern he had established in his advocacy of Jeremiah Reynolds’s expeditionary voyage. Though in this case funds were to come from the private bequest of James Smithson (benefactor of the Smithsonian Institution), Poe nevertheless advocates what might be called a trickle-down theory of information: In natural philosophy itself, the universal deficiency of apparatus is a lamentable drawback upon the utility of our colleges. They have no facilities for the conduct of our young men farther than the mere vestibule of the temple. Yet we, above all people of the earth, have the most need of the highest physical instruction, prefaced and aided by the profoundest analytical science. We are, beyond all other nations, a nation of physical wants, means, and opportunities—this no less from the character of our population, than from the extent and general nature of our territory. The entire spirit of the age, too, tends rather to physical than to moral investigation. We want means for the immediate development of all our powers and resources. It may be said, moreover, in favor of physical knowledge, that it is the property not of any individual, or of any people, but of mankind. All are interested in its pursuit; its profits all share; and herein consists its great superiority to mere literature; for whose advancement, indeed, we have already sufficient means—whose guidance and control may safely be left to the press.33

Poe here evaluates philanthropy through the lens of political economy, and he concludes that “physical knowledge” constitutes the best investment because it functions as a means of production, or in Poe’s phrase, a “means for the immediate development of all our powers and resources.” Apparently borrowing from Jeremiah Reynolds and Democratic rhetoric in general, Poe further justifies his position by claiming that physical knowledge, being the “property” of all mankind, produces profits for all to share. As demonstrated by quick comparison of sources, however, Poe was actually borrowing— sometimes verbatim—from the original text in the Southern Literary Messenger.34 Once again, then, Poe’s assimilations raise fundamental questions about the nature and meaning of his political statements. According to Bakhtin, “the ideological becoming of a human being . . . is the process of selectively assimilating the words of others,” but this tells us little about a commercial magazinist who, under pressure to “fill up” empty pages, decides to quote, paraphrase and even endorse the words of another writer.35 The central issue would therefore seem to be whether, and under what conditions, Poe’s borrowings signal the existence of what Bakhtin calls “internally persuasive” discourse: In the everyday rounds of our consciousness, the internally persuasive word is halfours and half-someone else’s. Its creativity and productiveness consist precisely in the fact that such a word awakens new and independent words, that it organizes masses of our words from within, and does not remain in an isolated and static condition. It is not so much interpreted by us as it is further, that is, freely, devel-


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oped, applied to new material, new conditions; it enters into interanimating relationships with new contexts. More than that, it enters into an intense interaction, a struggle with other internally persuasive discourses. (345–46)

Although this formulation is easier to admire than to apply, it does shed some light upon Poe’s political statements, especially those statements concerning the status of writers and the conditions of literary production. In many cases, such statements appear to be the result of Poe’s creative interaction with the political discourse of other writers. In his February, 1836 review of Henry F. Chorley’s Conti the Discarded, for example, Poe roundly denounces the social predicament of commercial authors. Much of the review is devoted to the book’s preface, where Chorley discusses the proper role of the artist in society. Since the topic holds special interest for Poe, he attempts a summary, but his task is rendered difficult by Chorley’s inconsistent and rambling mode of argument. On the one hand, Chorley blames the world for its willingness to “degrade Art into a mere plaything—to be enjoyed without respect and then cast aside—instead of receiving her high works as among the most humanizing blessings ever vouchsafed to man by a beneficent Creator” (ER, 164). On the other hand, Chorley castigates the artist who “brings his own calling into contempt by coarsely regarding it as a mere engine of money getting.” In any event, Chorley’s purpose is to foster a more harmonious relation between the artistic genius and society as a whole. His surprisingly mundane solution—given by Poe in paraphrase—is essentially a call for good behavior. According to Poe’s redaction, Chorley disputes the notion that “to despise and alienate the world is the inevitable and painfully glorious destiny of the highly gifted.” Instead, the “highly gifted” should follow the example of the responsible artists who have assumed their proper place among the class of (prosperous) middle-class professionals. Notable for their good conduct as well as their genius, these artists “have worthily taken their part in life as useful citizens, affectionate husbands, faithful friends.”36 Poe does not disparage these qualities, but he does take a more militant stand. Just as he had attempted to outshine Lucian Minor, Poe here strives to surpass the conventional authorial complaint. At the beginning of the review (his favorite place for position-taking), Poe accordingly offers a manifesto that eclipses Chorley’s modest agenda: When shall the artist assume his proper situation in society—in a society of thinking beings? How long shall he be enslaved? How long shall the mind succumb to the grossest materiality? How long shall the veriest vermin of the Earth, who crawl around the altar of Mammon, be more esteemed of men than they, the gifted ministers to those exalted emotions which link us with the mysteries of heaven: to our own query we may venture a reply. Not long. Not long will such rank injustice be committed or permitted. A spirit is already abroad at war with it. And in every billow of

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the unceasing sea of Change—and in every breath, however gentle, of the wide atmosphere of Revolution encircling us, is that spirit steadily yet irresistibly at work.

These are fighting words. Combining romantic aesthetics with revolutionary politics, Poe prophesies that an avenging “spirit” will somehow liberate writers from the wretched materialism of modern life, and perhaps from the specific political and economic problems described by Lucian Minor in “Selection in Reading,” which appeared in this same issue of the Messenger. Despite its focus on material conditions, however, the Chorley review is strikingly deficient when it comes to material solutions: a disembodied literary spirit will take arms against the disembodied perpetrator of gross injustice, and thereby enable artists to assume their proper rank, either in modern society or in that mysterious heaven to which they are so mysteriously linked. In his later defenses of literature, Poe learned to channel his militant sentiments into more workable proposals. Most notable in this regard is his longstanding support for the rights of authors and intellectual property. The first U.S. Copyright Act had been enacted in 1790, but due to the lobbying efforts of printers, the Act protected only works by American authors. Continued pressure by the publishing industry helped to forestall an Anglo-American copyright agreement until 1891. In effect, then, the law sanctioned the piracy of works by foreign writers, which in turn forced American writers to compete with a flood of cheap reprints. American writers faced a related problem in foreign markets. Britain went further than the U.S. to safeguard literary property (protection was extended to works first published in Britain and to works by British residents, regardless of nationality), but under these conditions it was still difficult for American authors to benefit from foreign sales. A few enterprising writers did find ways to circumvent the reprint pirates. Taking their cue from Washington Irving, they made arrangements for first publication in Britain, ordered advance sheets to be sent back by swift packet ships, and then, preempting any “unauthorized” acts of piracy, they flooded the American market with reprints of their own works. This method of sequential or nearly simultaneous publication enabled some writers to capture markets on both sides of the Atlantic, but most lacked the resources, prospects, and connections to attempt such a far-flung venture.37 Poe and many other American authors therefore staked their hopes on an international copyright agreement. Echoing the indignation of the Chorley review, Poe on several occasions complained about the inadequacies of existing copyright legislation. Frequently Poe singled out the literary genius as the most tragic victim: A man of genius, if not permitted to choose his own subject, will do worse, in letters, than if he had talents none at all. And here how imperatively is he controlled! To be sure, he can write to suit himself—but in the same manner can the publishers print. From the nature of the Copy-Right laws, he has no individual powers. (ER, 1332)


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Once again, Poe focuses on the way that external economic conditions penetrate inward to control the process and the final product of literary composition. In 1845 Poe extended his analysis from the individual writer to the nation as a whole. Conceding that existing legislation allowed the public to obtain “more reading for less money,” Poe discusses three “remoter” disadvantages that carry “infinitely greater weight.” First, according to Poe, the absence of international copyright legislation suppresses the poverty-stricken genius and burdens the national literature with the effusions of wealthy writers: “we are written at only by our ‘gentlemen of elegant leisure,’ and mere gentlemen of elegant leisure have been noted, time out of mind, for the insipidity of their productions.” Second, Poe contends that foreign reprints do the country “irreparable ill” by disseminating “monarchical or aristocratical sentiment.” Finally, in the passage most redolent of the Chorley review, Poe hints darkly about the risks of “autorial” revenge: The last and by far the most important consideration of all, however, is that sense of insult and injury aroused in the whole active intellect of the world, the bitter and fatal resentment excited in the universal heart of literature—a resentment which will not and which cannot make nice distinctions between the temporary perpetrators of the wrong and that democracy in general which permits its perpetration. The autorial body is the most autocratic on the face of the earth. How, then, can those institutions even hope to be safe which systematically persist in trampling it under foot? (ER, 1375)

The enemies of democracy abound. According to Poe, the very law designed to provide cheap literature for the masses would instead undermine democracy by privileging gentleman-scribblers, by encouraging the importation of monarchical texts, and by provoking antidemocratic responses from the autocratic class of authors. As a consequence, talented writers would become estranged from American society, not because of taste or training, but because of the economic crimes perpetrated against them. It is therefore no surprise that the intellectuals in Poe’s fiction are frequently misfits whose social estrangement can be traced to political and especially economic causes. Dupin, for example, was born into an “illustrious family,” but due to “a variety of untoward events, had been reduced to such poverty that the energy of his character succumbed beneath it” (PT, 400). Similarly, in “The Gold-Bug” Legrand comes from “an ancient Huguenot family” and had “once been wealthy,” but as we learn at the beginning of the tale, “a series of misfortunes had reduced him to want” (PT, 560). Significantly, when these impoverished intellectuals seek to escape from poverty, their schemes are often infused with the spirit of revenge. In “The Purloined Letter,” Dupin solves the case partly because the perpetrator had done him “an evil turn” (PT, 698). Legrand, who is “infected with misanthropy,” likewise confesses that he

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had devised his elaborate plot because he was “annoyed” with the narrator’s mistrust: “and so [I] resolved to punish you quietly, with a little bit of sober mystification” (PT, 560, 595). Also belonging to this category of creative revenge is the tale “Hop-Frog,” in which the titular character, having been more thoroughly degraded, exacts a more terrifying retribution. In his literary politics, however, Poe was not satisfied with mere gestures of revenge. As a magazinist, he understood the art of position-taking and public advocacy; as an impoverished commercial writer, he further understood the need for direct intervention into the legal and economic conditions of literary production. Sometimes this meant joining the lobbying efforts of a loose affiliation of his peers, as when he lent his voice to the campaign for an AngloAmerican copyright agreement. At other times, it meant advocating more militant forms of collective action. Frustrated by his failure to find investors for his magazine venture, Poe in 1844 conspired to create a magazine through a “radically different” strategy that would eliminate dependence on a wealthy proprietor. As mentioned earlier, Poe had portrayed himself to James R. Lowell as a visionary Byronic figure. In another letter to Lowell composed during the same period, Poe showed a different side of himself when he explained his new magazine scheme: Such a journal might, perhaps, be set on foot by a coalition, and thus set on foot, with proper understanding, would be irresistible. Suppose, for example, that the élite of our men of letters should combine secretly. . . . The articles to be supplied by the members solely, and upon a concerted plan of action. A nominal editor to be elected from among the number. How could such a journal fail? I would like very much to hear your opinion upon this matter. Could not the “ball be set in motion”? If we do not defend ourselves by some such coalition, we shall be devoured, without mercy, by the Godeys, the Snowdens, et id genus omne. (Letters, 1:247)

The plan was never implemented, but as Poe said in a subsequent letter to Lowell, he had “thought of this matter long and cautiously,” and he was convinced of the need for authors to form some kind of secret coalition to protect themselves “from the imposition of publishers” (1:265–66). As I shall demonstrate in Chapter Three, it was in fact the “grand purpose” of Poe’s life to escape from the control of the Capital Reader into a lucrative realm of literary freedom. It would therefore be a mistake to characterize Poe as a Southern conservative who was hostile to all social change. For one thing, his pessimism was generally displayed in response to ascendant or hegemonic ideologies of reform, thereby giving Poe the opportunity to stake out daring or scandalous positions of his own. Second, many of Poe’s overt political pronouncements— progressive and reactionary—were largely derived from the words of others, which indicates a negative political capability rather than a rigid ideological agenda. Finally, the overall pattern of Poe’s career suggests that he was not


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altogether devoid of political sentiments. It would be more correct to say that his political sentiments were developed within the constraints of the antebellum publishing environment. From Poe’s perspective, this environment was exceedingly harsh: the forms of writing that survived the initial violence of the panic would later be forced to endure the homogenizing pressures of the mass market. Haunted by the specter of overproduction that was first descried by Lucian Minor in 1836 and then made flesh by the Panic of 1837, Poe understood that the universal equivalence of all entertainment commodities could erase the qualitative differences among texts, thereby subjecting poetic beauty to the horrid laws of political economy.38 In this light, Poe’s criticism seems less an attempt to preserve antiquated standards than a struggle against the homogenizing forces that threatened to annihilate qualitative difference as such. This much is apparent in Poe’s 1842 “Exordium to Critical Notices,” where the victim of homogeneity is not poetry but criticism itself. In an attempt to maintain some distinction between criticism and other forms of writing, Poe vehemently protests against the “frantic spirit of generalization.” He complains particularly of the lighter journals, which combine so many different varieties of writing under the title of “review” that they render the term “criticism” meaningless. Poe realizes, however, that such incidents of generalization are merely symptoms of a larger problem: This tendency has been given [to criticism], in the first instance, by the onward and tumultuous spirit of the age. With the increase in the thinking-material comes the desire, if not the necessity, of abandoning particulars for masses.39

Poe here presents a scenario that contrasts starkly with the predictions of Lucian Minor. While Minor feared that the overproduction of texts would lead to specialized, fragmented “coteries,” Poe believed that the increase in “thinking material” would result in the loss of formal difference because of pressures to standardize literary and even critical texts. As I argue in Chapter Four, Poe viewed the annihilation of difference as a social as well as a linguistic catastrophe, so that while Minor lamented the disappearance of the public, Poe foresaw the emergence of the masses.

III. SOCIAL PROGRESS AND LITERARY NOVELTY Resisting the mass-market tendency toward uniform, standardized texts, Poe began to construct an aesthetic theory that made novelty into one of the primary measures of literary value. According to “The Philosophy of Composition,” for example, a writer should keep “originality always in view—for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest” (ER, 13). Poe was of course influenced by the pervasive rhetoric of newness, and his literary theories owed much to the campaigns

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for internal improvement and information dissemination that were so essential to U.S. economic expansion. As Poe repeatedly discovered, his literary theories could in no way resolve social conflicts over the value and supply of literature. But by clarifying the real predicament of the commercial writer, these theories enabled Poe to seek other sanctuaries—in fantasies of magazine ownership, in fictions of alternative economies, and of course in death. Regardless of attitudes toward federalism, nearly every political figure from the Revolution through the Civil War understood the need for the government to facilitate the diffusion of information, both to promote a stable social order and to stimulate economic development.40 As this suggests, the discourse of information actually combined two distinct prerequisites of economic expansion: the ability to gather and disseminate information to direct the flows of labor and capital; and the capability to produce, through ideological conditioning, citizens who could sustain the new economic order. Thus Horace Mann touted education as “the grand agent for the development or augmentation of national resources, more powerful in the production and gainful employment of the total wealth of a country than all the other things mentioned in the books of the political economists.”41 In many ways, then, projects for internal improvement began and ended with information. Jefferson, for example, sought ways to gather information about demography, geography and transportation, but at the same time he encouraged the flow of information in the reverse direction, from the central government to the public. Dispersing “information to the people,” wrote Jefferson, “is the most certain and the most legitimate insurance of government.”42 Others placed a stronger emphasis on developing networks for distributing this information, for they recognized that a nascent capitalist economy could not compete in a world market unless its communications infrastructure were as advanced as those of foreign competitors. Speaking in favor of the crucial Survey Act of 1824, Representative Joseph Hemphill argued that the plan would “require little money compared with the importance of the information,” and that “nothing [could] be more useful than an accurate knowledge of the natural capacities of the country for improvements.” Such improvements, it should be noted, were in part designed to enhance the conveyance of information even further. Before his transformation from nationalist to sectionalist, even John C. Calhoun championed improvements in transportation and communications. In his last annual report as Secretary of War (1824), Calhoun advocated an extensive series of canals, arguing that “such a system of improvements . . . would greatly facilitate commerce and intercourse among the States, while it would afford the Government the means of transmitting information through the mail promptly to every part.”43 Transmitting information was indeed one of the government’s highest priorities. In 1831, postal employees made up 76.3 percent of the federal work force; by the eve of the Civil War the figure had risen to 82.5 percent, meaning that out of a


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total of 36,672 federal workers, 30,269 were employees of the postal system. Significantly, support for the diffusion of information continued even when other internal improvements were challenged. According to Carter Goodrich, it was “widely accepted that the general strictures against the economic activity of government should not apply to the provision of improved means of communication.”44 But what was to be communicated? It has often been noted that the transportation revolution in many ways preceded the so-called industrial revolution in America. According to James Beniger, industrialization cannot occur “unless an adequate infrastructure for the movement and processing of matter, energy, and information already exists.” Because of this, Beniger continues, “initial development of the tertiary (transportation and utilities) and quaternary (trade, finance, and insurance) sectors may just as well be viewed as a precondition of industrialization than as a harbinger of postindustrial society.”45 What applies to industry in general also applies to the publishing industry in particular, for a mass literary market could not have emerged without an adequate communications infrastructure. It is important to note, however, that the early development of this infrastructure was designed to foster the “diffusion of useful knowledge,” not to facilitate the dissemination of crime stories, sporting news, and patent medicine advertisements so characteristic of the penny press. Before the advent of the so-called culture industry, states and corporations had already taken major steps to knit the country together into a single economic unit. These early investments could only be recouped though further economic development, which was one of the reasons that the first improvements in communications were oriented more toward production rather than consumption.46 This orientation made literature a bad investment in the new cities of the West. As one aspiring magazinist learned from a relative in Missouri, The maintenance of a literary paper requires a large population of affluent persons who have considerable leisure, and who can devote some portion of their time to the finer parts of literature. Such is not the character of the people of the West. . . . Most of them cannot be considered wealthy, and all of them are deeply engaged in some species of business. Of course they have but little time or inclination to devote to literary pursuits. No literary paper of any kind has been successfully established, west of Cincinnati.47

In the 1830s and 1840s, however, the communications infrastructure was pressed into service for the distribution of entertainment commodities throughout the emerging mass market, thereby obscuring its original economic function. But although this engine of capitalist development was buried under a welter of miscellaneous and sensational textuality, it continued to play an indispensable role in the national economy. Though not always perceptible in literary affairs of the day, such long-term economic forces exerted a

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profound influence on American culture during the antebellum period. This influence extended to workers in the publishing industry, which helps to explain Poe’s habitual support for public education, copyright reform, expeditionary voyages, scientific research, and other projects associated with the dissemination of useful information. As Poe realized, however, even “useful” information is a curious thing. Unlike the raw materials and labor that transfer value to the final product by being transformed, “creatively destroyed” or otherwise used up, information apparently adds value without losing any itself. In fact, this capacity for endless reuse is what makes intellectual property so vulnerable to theft, for if it were used up in the process of production, there would be no reason to protect it with special legislation. Furthermore, a resource has value under capitalism only insofar as it makes a measurable contribution to profits or the production of surplus value, but much information functions to prevent unprofitable investments, to warn about the plans of competitors, to predict or prevent collective action by workers, or to direct commodity flows away from sagging markets. Information that positively contributes to production is ultimately absorbed into some identifiable commodity, but cautionary information is consumed without creating a future object into which it can be absorbed. It is productively consumed, but it produces nothing. The Capital Reader would perhaps have little use for such distinctions, knowing that the value of information depends not on any metaphysical niceties but on the practical calculations of practical people. And yet, considered from the standpoint of society as a whole, the communications infrastructure seems fraught with subtleties and contradictions. Information, for example, must do more than contain some commercially useful meaning; it must also convey this meaning in a certain socially determined form. In discussing changes in the “thinking material,” Poe aptly describes the new formal requirements for information—it must be precise, condensed, well-digested, and capable of rapid dissemination.48 Information possesses yet another characteristic, which arises less from its intrinsic value in production than from its strategic advantage against competitors. Due to unrestrictive market conditions and a state-sponsored program of internal improvements in transportation and communications, the U.S. economy enabled easy access to an increasing accumulation of commercially useful information. Obviously, one needed capital in order to exploit such “common knowledge,” a fact overlooked by Poe and other exponents of a trickle-down theory of information. But to the extent that information is common and accessible, its precise usevalue in the production process remains uncalculated and its exchange value tends toward zero.49 Under market capitalism, the most valuable information is that which has not become common knowledge and which, through restricted or differential distribution, affords a competitive advantage to its possessor. Haunted by the prospect of falling behind the competition or missing


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out on some recent innovation, the capitalist takes common knowledge for granted while indulging an incessant appetite for new information. Traditional economists tend to avoid the distinction between commodified and traditional meaning, or between intellectual property and common knowledge, by falling back upon the celebratory rhetoric of innovation and change. In his pioneering work on the economics of information, for example, Fritz Machlup emphasizes the importance of new information over knowledge of “the entire state of affairs.” According to Machlup, “for most practical purposes . . . only the knowledge of the change in circumstances matters.”50 In a footnote, Machlup goes on to complain that “almost the entire literature in this area fails to distinguish between the existing vague and uncertain knowledge of the entire state of affairs and a rather unambiguous and relatively certain piece of information about a new event or change in the situation.” In recent years the pendulum has swung to the other extreme, for today there is a widespread tendency to neglect the “entire state of affairs” in favor of novel—and disposable—information. “If you’ve got a steady information flow,” comments one information specialist, “you don’t want to know all the details; you just want to know when there’s a change in the flow.”51 At this distance from the details, the value of information is determined not by its total contribution to the production process but by the strategic and temporary advantages it affords against competitors. The emphasis on short-term competitive value over long-term usefulness has become so acute that some economists now routinely refer to “perishable information.”52 Clearly, this perishable commodity functions less as a consumer good than as capital, and this in turn raises considerations for the political interpretation of literature. Unfortunately, many cultural critics write as if ideology were the only important link between a text and the mode of production. When economic determination is affirmed at all, it is usually assumed that the text will, in a moment of utter abasement, descend to the level of entertainment commodities. But this assumption unwittingly accepts the premises of post-war consumer society at the very moment when objective conditions are making the realization of such a society increasingly improbable. Like the campaign for internal improvements in antebellum America, the so-called information economy is driven less by consumer demand than by the peculiar requirements of capitalist development in periods of instability and crisis. The structural similarity between Poe’s time and the present reveals one of the decisive factors behind the transformation of the antebellum publishing environment, namely the emergence of information as an economic good. Acutely aware of the growing commercialization of meaning, Poe appropriated the rage for new information and shrewdly refashioned it into an aesthetics of novelty. In Poe’s aesthetics, novelty serves as one of the primary measures of literary value. When a literary market is beset by overproduction, when an editor must confront, on a daily basis, “a flood of publications . . . sufficient to

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occupy, in the most cursory perusal, the attention of some ten or twenty readers for a month,” it becomes necessary to devise critical methods which can quickly sort through a new mass of texts (ER, 1008). For Poe, this situation was aggravated by the absence of an international copyright agreement, which allowed British and Continental works to be reprinted by U.S. publishers without recompense to the authors. Because legal and market conditions drove the cost of production downward toward the cost of printing, the creative labor of writing was utterly devalued the moment the text entered the public domain. In addition, when such factors as the spread of literacy, the growth of the periodical press, and the increasing efficiency of international communication networks came together under capitalism, ancient writers were resurrected as competitors of living authors, thereby transforming the entire intellectual tradition into an enemy power. Confronted by the dual pressures of over-accumulation and over-production, Poe quite logically sought out axiological criteria more consonant with the ideology of progress. In his new aesthetic, there was even a place, albeit a dubious one, for truth. In a letter to John Pendleton Kennedy soliciting support for his projected Penn Magazine, Poe wrote that “a rigorous independence shall be my watchword still—truth, not so much for truth’s sake, as for the sake of the novelty of the thing.”53 In his magisterial essay on “The American Drama,” Poe explores the link between capitalist development and a poetics of novelty. Accounting for the apparent stagnation of the drama, Poe relates artistic development to prevailing social ideologies: The great opponent to Progress is Conservatism. In other words—the great adversary of Invention is imitation. . . . The most imitative arts are the most prone to repose— and the converse. Upon the utilitarian—upon the business arts, where Necessity impels, Invention, Necessity’s well-understood offspring, is ever in attendance. . . . No one complains of the decline of the art of Engineering. (ER, 357)

Arts like sculpture and painting have failed to “advance” because they rely on traditional techniques and subjects; architecture has progressed in its utilitarian but not in its ornamental branches. “Where Reason predominated, we advanced; where mere Feeling or Taste was the guide, we remained as we were.” American dramatists, guided by feeling and taste rather than innovative reason, have been content to imitate dramas of the past. If the public does not support so conservative an art, Poe concludes, it is because the art “does not deserve support.” Poe’s solution is as stark as his diagnosis: burn the old models, consider anew the capabilities of the drama, and let Feeling and Taste be “guided and controlled in every particular by the details of Reason” (ER, 360). Not incidentally, this same argument underlies Poe’s greatest critical performances (“The Philosophy of Composition”) and literary innovations (the detective tale).


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Something strange happens, however, when pure novelty becomes the coin of an axiological realm. Although the value of a text would be measured by its newness or by its difference from the vast accumulation of common knowledge, too great an adherence to the principle of novelty would make the text unreadable. Not surprisingly, Poe detects this problem in transcendentalism and orphicism, two literary practices which, like Poe’s own writing, were struggling to adapt to an overproductive publishing environment. Mocking the seer who attempted to convey an idea too vast and novel for “ordinary words, in ordinary collocations,” Poe recommends plain talk or complete silence: If a man—if an Orphicist—or a SEER—or whatever else he may choose to call himself, while the rest of the world calls him an ass—if this gentleman have an idea which he does not understand himself, the best thing he can do is to say nothing about it; for, of course, he can entertain no hope that what he, the SEER, cannot comprehend, should be comprehended by the mass of common humanity; but if he have an idea which is actually intelligible to himself. . . . He should speak to the people in that people’s ordinary tongue. (ER, 290–91)

But how does one speak novelty in the people’s ordinary tongue? Taking his cue from the general devaluation of common knowledge, Poe had begun to judge a text by its novelty. If, however, the text were destined to be consumed for entertainment by a mass audience rather than valorized (i.e., consumed profitably) by capitalists, novelty would in many ways become the enemy of meaning. No doubt Poe would have preferred to avoid any complicity in the degrading effects of a mass literary market and publishing industry. Since he could not, since he was “essentially a magazinist,” he developed a theory of novelty which compromises between progress and tradition while deferring the fundamental antagonism between private information and common knowledge.54 In order to maintain this position, Poe was forced to represent literary combination—elsewhere denigrated as mere cutting and pasting—as a skilled or value-adding form of labor. Accordingly, Poe defines beauty as “the novel collocation of old forms of the Beautiful and the Sublime,” or as the “novel combinations of those combinations which our predecessors, toiling in chase of the same phantom, have already set in order” (ER, 278, 687). Though this appears to collapse the distinction between novelty and conventionality, he adamantly maintains that “All novel conceptions are merely unusual combinations. The mind of man can imagine nothing which has not really existed.”55 The problem here is that Poe denounced anyone who followed his advice. He accused numerous writers of plagiarism, but he heaped his most bitter scorn precisely on those authors who relied on combination rather than creativity. In an 1839 review of The Canons of Good Breeding, Poe denounces the

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author for possessing “a rabid ambition for the reputation of a wit” and for being “unscrupulous” enough to “clip, cut and most assiduously intersperse throughout his book, by wholesale,” the wisdom and erudition of others (ER, 456). Criticizing the same practice in a novel by William Harrison Ainsworth, Poe complains that “the elaborately-interwoven pedantry irritates, insults, and disgusts” (ER, 102). And when Poe depicts the practice of magazine writing in “How to Write a Blackwood Article” and “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.” he likewise attacks the ambitious yet incompetent drudges who compose through outrageous combination. Once again, then, Poe ended up reproducing in his aesthetic theory the social antagonisms which he sought to escape or resolve. In the 1830s he witnessed the homogenizing power of capital in the publishing environment and the subsequent devaluation of common knowledge in favor of new information. As the law of value regulating information was enveloped within the emerging literary market, and as the quantitative logic of production was juxtaposed against the qualitative experience of consumption, Poe discovered that the mass audience could not read pure novelty. Dependent on the common knowledge of the masses, yet driven by the onward rush of information, writers attempted to construct new effects out of old materials. In the face of such difficulties, Poe sought to combine the discrete charms of novelty and tradition, but his combinatory aesthetics could not resolve the original contradictions—between common knowledge and private intellectual property, between the popular and the critical taste, or between the literary commodities of the publishing industry and the exalted creations of genius. These contradictions can all be traced to the crisis of literary overproduction, which was widely acknowledged by antebellum writers. As indicated in Chapter One, Lucian Minor feared that the increase of magazines, newspapers, books, pamphlets and ideas would fragment society into discrete discursive “coteries” that would be incapable of communicating with each other.56 Margaret Fuller likewise complained of overproduction, although she focused on the apparent trade-off between quantity and literary quality: No form of literary activity has so terribly degenerated among us as the tale. Now that everybody that wants a new hat or bonnet takes this way to earn one from the magazines or annuals, we are inundated with the very flimsiest fabrics ever spun by mortal brain. . . . The sale-work produced is a sad affair indeed and “gluts the market” to the sorrow of both buyers and lookers-on.57

Even John Quincy Adams noticed the glut in the publishing industry. When Thomas Willis White invited him to contribute to the first issue of the Southern Literary Messenger, Adams respectfully declined: “Your design is so laudable, that I would gladly contribute to its promotion, but the periodical literature of the country seems rather superabundant than scanty.”58


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Poe’s unique response to the crisis of abundance—novelty through combination—reflected his understanding of capitalist development as well as his firsthand experience of the contradictory social relations that sometimes ensued. Thus at the same time that Poe assailed writers whose compositions fell short of novelty, he demanded that publishers pay a decent wage for the labor of combination. “To originate, is carefully, patiently, and understandingly to combine,” Poe wrote in 1845. “The few Magazinists who ever think of this elaboration at all, cannot afford to carry it into practice for the paltry prices offered them by our periodical publishers.”59 Naming the problem, of course, was not the same as solving it, and Poe could find no practical way to escape the spiral of overproduction. Ultimately, then, his aesthetics of “novel repetition” had little more to recommend it than sheer productivity. Whereas works like Charles O’Malley, The Irish Dragoon were limited by their heavy reliance upon old tales, which were “the common property of the bivouac,” true originality knew no bounds. “So long as the universe of thought shall furnish matter for novel combinations,” Poe claimed, “so long will the spirit of true genius be original, be exhaustless—be itself.”60 Unfortunately, the real conditions of the publishing industry called for a very different assessment, one given by Poe himself in a letter to Naval Secretary James Kirke Paulding: “Could I obtain the most unimportant Clerkship in your gift—any thing, by sea or land—to relieve me from the miserable life of literary drudgery to which I, now, with breaking heart, submit . . . I would never again repine at any dispensation of God” (Letters, 2:681).

IV. IMAGINARY ECONOMIES In recent years increasing attention has been paid to the profession of authorship and the determining power of the literary marketplace. Older studies of the publishing industry have given way to several new and theoretically divergent approaches, including New Historicism, the history of the book, and updated versions of the sociology of literature. As a result, the material or economic conditions of writing have again come to be viewed as legitimate fields for humanistic inquiry, not merely because they contribute to the interpretation of specific texts, but also because these material conditions reveal something about the nature and destiny of society as a whole. And yet, the new approaches have not entirely displaced the traditional image of the artist as a prophetic being. That is, artists are now commonly viewed as “leading indicators” of social or economic conditions, but even in this capacity they are revered as the bearers of special wisdom, foresight, or intuition. Fortunately, such remnants of classical and romantic tradition are not utterly anathema to a political economy of literature. Indeed, for the purposes of this

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investigation, the myth of the prophetic artist may even afford certain advantages, especially insofar as the combination of residual romanticism and emergent materialism enables a reevaluation of Poe’s predicament as a commercial writer. Building upon the fortuitous conjunction of romanticism and materialism, such a reevaluation can today commence with a new premise, namely that Poe fulfilled his prophetic function not by imagining “a ghostly afterlife” but instead by imagining alternative economies and alternative modes of production. It would be easier to perceive Poe’s prophecy against capitalism if he had been a more active participant in the political affairs of his day, for then he might have recorded a wider range of responses to the prevailing social order. As suggested above, however, Poe’s reticence on partisan political issues was counterbalanced by his special attentiveness to the literary market. Critics have long seized upon Poe’s seemingly apolitical imagination as evidence of his isolation from the gritty and mundane world of the publishing industry. Aside from limiting our grasp of Poe and his age, this presumption has prevented a full exploration of the critical essays and reviews which make up the bulk of Poe’s writing. Unlike most critics in antebellum America, Poe’s judgments were relatively free from the principles and customs of the legal profession. Obviously, literary evaluation is guided by the terms, discourse, and agenda of a specific critical tradition, but in antebellum America, the majority of critics had devoted part of their careers to legal apprenticeship or practice. Accounting for the origins of nineteenth-century critical thought, William Charvat emphasizes that eight of the ten most important literary critics had training in the law.61 Jay B. Hubbell further observes that although wealthy planters set the “tone” for Southern society, “in intellectual matters it was generally the lawyers who took the lead.”62 This observation holds for the Southern Literary Messenger, whose most important supporters shared a legal background (the list would include Beverley Tucker, James Heath, and Lucian Minor). Poe, in contrast, was much more familiar with commerce and economics than with the law. As foster son to an important Richmond merchant, as company clerk in the 1st Artillery Regiment, and as a professional writer and magazinist, Poe’s judgments about value bore a closer relation to commercial practices than to juridical notions of justice. Coming from a mercantile family background, and commencing work in the magazine trade after having sunk into what witnesses identified as a condition of starvation and despair,63 Poe was adept at translating between the discourses of commerce and literature. In his reviews, he prided himself on being able to identify which books could sell “at periods when the general market for literary wares is in a state of stagnation.”64 He also prided himself on his understanding of economic theory. In an 1837 review of George Balcombe by Beverley Tucker, jurist and Professor of


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Law at the College of William and Mary, Poe corrects the judge’s misunderstanding of how the theory of supply and demand might be applied to human qualities rather than commodities: . . . truth and honor form no exceptions to the rule of economy, that value depends upon demand and supply. The simple meaning of the rule is, that when the demand for a commodity is great, and the supply small, the value of a commodity is heightened, and the converse. Apply this to truth and honor. . . . [It] is clear that were all men true and honest, then truth and honor, beyond their intrinsic, would hold no higher value, than would wine in a Paradise where all the rivers were Johannisberger, and all the duck-ponds Vin de Margaux. (ER, 978)

In this review Poe not only demonstrates a mastery of economic terminology, he also reveals a rather perverse willingness to subject moral and spiritual qualities to the quantitative assessments of the capitalist marketplace. A year earlier, he demonstrated a similar willingness when he claimed that his tale “Berenice” could be better evaluated “by the circulation of the Magazine than by any comments upon its contents.”65 For Poe, however, the law of supply and demand was more than a mere economic formula; it was also a means to explain the social and historical predicament of the commercial writer. In his comments on Greek oratory, for instance, Poe claimed that classical orations benefited from “the gigantic force of the new,” but this force declined over time as social knowledge accumulated. As a result, modern orators labored at a distinct disadvantage: “The finest Philippic of the Greek would have been hooted at in the British House of Peers, while an impromptu of Sheridan, or of Brougham, would have carried by storm all the hearts and all the intellects of Athens” (ER, 1359). In his manuscript draft of “The Living Writers of America,” Poe made a similar argument about literary fame. Responding to charges that America has produced no Milton, Poe argues that Milton lived in an epoch when there was “no competition,” when a writer “required infinitely less genius than now to acquire fame—i.e. to rise above the ocean-level.”66 Poe even believed that the law of supply and demand could operate within a single poem; as he observes in the epigraph to this chapter, the “brilliancies” of Thomas Moore’s “Lalla Rookh” are “so plentifully set forth as to be absolutely of no value at all.” Value was indeed the crux of the matter. In his review of Beverley Tucker, Poe not only shifts between insubstantial virtues like honor and hard commodities such as cotton and tobacco, he also develops a distinction between intrinsic or use-value and exchange value.67 It is likely that Poe derived this distinction, directly or indirectly, from Adam Smith, who observes that the term “value” can refer to either the “utility of a particular object” or to the “power of purchasing other goods which the possession of that object

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conveys.”68 But whereas Smith seeks to preserve both meanings of value, Poe seems haunted by the possibility that use-value will be utterly subsumed into exchange-value, thereby transforming the market into the ultimate arbiter of taste. It was a possibility that both repulsed and fascinated Poe, for although he frequently denounced salability as a test of true literary merit, he was nevertheless captivated by the absurd or perverse consequences that would ensue if the laws of political economy were to take dominion everywhere. In 1849, for example, Poe made the law of supply and demand the central theme of “Von Kempelen and His Discovery.” Building upon his earlier statements about water, poetry, and honor, Poe uses the story to illustrate what would happen if lead could be transmuted into gold. If the philosopher’s stone were to become a scientific fact, the story explains, it would so drastically increase supply that gold would lose all value beyond its “intrinsic worth for manufacturing purposes” (ER, 915). Poe explicitly offers this scenario as a cure to the California gold fever that had so recently infected the masses, but “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” raises several vexing questions about value. For one thing, the social consequences of the discovery are not at all clear. Although Von Kempelen and his friends may reap huge profits, “it yet remains to be seen whether this momentous discovery itself will be of service or disservice to mankind at large” (ER, 911). At the end of the story, Poe makes his position clear by deprecating Von Kempelen’s service to mankind and by raising the specter of economic speculation. According to the final sentence, the most “noticeable results” of the discovery are merely a 25 percent increase in the price of silver and a 200 percent increase in the price of lead. In this dismal light, Von Kempelen’s gold can scarcely be mistaken for the stuff that dreams are made of. “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” also questions the wisdom of equating thinking material with capital. As mentioned in Chapter One, Poe at the beginning of his career had drawn an explicit economic analogy between knowledge and gold (ER, 1318). Though such analogies were rather common, Poe was probably influenced by the work of John W. Draper, a professor of chemistry at Hampden-Sidney College and later at the University of the City of New York. In 1836 Thomas W. White published Draper’s Introductory Lecture to a Course of Chemistry and Natural Philosophy; as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger (also published by White), Poe noticed this publication and reprinted a lengthy excerpt exhibiting “unusual interest and beauty.” The key passage from Draper comes at the beginning of the excerpt: “Knowledge, like wealth horded up, has its compound interest, increasing in an almost geometrical ratio. A single discovery in one science sheds light on all kindred knowledge, which is reflected back again.”69 By 1849, however, Poe had come to view Draper with scorn. In “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” Poe accordingly disparages “so eminent a chemist as Professor Draper,” because he demonstrates “how very easily men of science are mystified, on points outside of


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their usual range of inquiry” (PT, 910). In Eureka, Poe explains his antipathy toward Draper and other followers of Francis Bacon (or “Hog-ites”). According to Poe, such plodding scientists debase truth by churning out endless quantities of dull “facts” for the marketplace: The vital taint, however, in Baconianism—its most lamentable fount of error—lay in its tendency to throw power and consideration into the hands of merely perceptive men . . . the diggers and peddlers of minute facts, for the most part in physical science—facts all of which they retailed at the same price on the highway; their value depending, it was supposed, simply on the fact of their fact, without reference to their applicability or inapplicability in the development of those ultimate and only legitimate facts, called Law.70

As explained in Chapter Eight, this precisely duplicates Dupin’s criticism of the Parisian Police and their bureaucratic approach to truth. Once again, then, Poe confronted the homogenizing tendencies of the publishing environment, only this time he was appalled to see knowledge reduced into trivial units destined to be “retailed at the same price on the highway.” He was especially dismayed to see facts mindlessly collected and sold without regard to their “ultimate” value, namely their use in discovering absolute Truth, or in enabling the Soul “to soar in those regions of illimitable intuition” (PT, 1269). Science had succumbed to the rationalizing pressures of a capitalist economy, and Poe clearly wanted to protect writing from suffering a similar fate. He could imagine subjecting cotton, honor, or gold to the most extreme laws of supply and demand, but for his own literary productions Poe generally preferred a different measure of value, namely the amount of labor expended in the process of composition. Attempting to correct a miscalculation regarding payment for “Hans Pfaall,” Poe in 1835 argued that the thirty-four columns of text cost him “nearly a fortnight’s hard labor” and should accordingly earn him greater compensation (Letters, 1:66). In 1845, when the country was still recovering from a severe economic depression, Poe again claimed that the magazine industry should be guided by fair expenditures for labor time rather than the harsher exigencies of supply and demand. In a review of Frederick Von Raumer’s America and the American People, Poe points out that the German traveler suffered from “imperfect means of information,” especially about American literature (Works 13:14). Poe takes special exception to Von Raumer’s assertion that “authors of really able productions are liberally rewarded in America.” Von Raumer refers specifically to the large sum ($6,000) paid to William Prescott for his History of the Conquest of Mexico. Poe angrily retorts that Von Raumer has ignored the real costs—including labor time and raw materials—of literary production: Had the Professor made farther inquiry he would have found that Mr. Prescott was engaged for many years at his work, and that he expended for the necessary books

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and other materials a large sum:—the compensation thus afforded him, amounting in the end to little more than any common scavenger might have earned in the same period, upon our highways. (Works 13:15)

Poe here resists the tendencies of capitalist production that he elsewhere takes to extremes. In other words, he freely imagines the consequences of subjecting a multitude of objects and qualities to market forces, but when these same forces threaten literature, he becomes a decidedly political economist, seeking special exemption for textual commodities in order to improve the lot of commercial writers. Poe’s economic imagination was shaped by a number of factors, ranging from historical writing to technological innovation to regional differences in the antebellum economy. History was one of the most popular and prestigious forms of writing in antebellum America; as William Charvat observes, it was also “the first genre to be successfully established on a profitable professional basis.”71 Poe was enormously attentive to such market trends, and in his editorial writings he demonstrates an extensive familiarity with all manner of history books, biographies, travel narratives, and historical romances. These texts gave Poe a keen appreciation of historical differences in the economic and political organization of society—differences which his contemporaries often invoked to justify or to criticize the existing order of things. In a review of Frederick Von Raumer’s England in 1835, for example, Poe comments on the contemporary political purposes of historical writing. As previously noted, Poe elsewhere chides Von Raumer for misrepresenting the economic plight of commercial writers in the United States, but in this review Poe praises the German historian for “diverting the minds of our countrymen . . . from that perpetual and unhealthy excitement about the forms and machinery of governmental action which have within the last half century so absorbed their attention as to exclude in a strange degree all care of the proper results of good government—the happiness of a people—improvement in the condition of mankind—practicable under a thousand forms—and without which all forms are valueless and shadowy phantoms.”72 The review goes on to praise Von Raumer’s account of British economic history, which Poe finds especially intriguing: His remarks on the absence of all finance in the middle ages will arrest attention. In these days men had no money, and yet did more than in modern times—they effected every thing, and we can effect nothing without the circulation of the “golden blood.” Every individual in those days, garnered, says Raumer, without the medium of money, what he wanted; and the whole society was entirely kept together by ideas. It is only since Machiavelli—since the power of the middle ages was lost in the feudal and ecclesiastical systems, that we have had to seek a new public law, and a science of Finance.73


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This may seem an altogether fabulous account of medieval political economy, but it nevertheless enabled Poe to conceive of capitalism as one of many possible modes of production, rather than a natural or universal human condition. Also worth noting is the way Poe muses about different economic—as opposed to different political—formations. Although he begins his review by disparaging “unhealthy excitement” over the forms of government, he nevertheless indulges his own fascination with alternatives to the present economic order. A similar fascination with economic alternatives can be found in Poe’s descriptions of scientific and technological developments. In his 1845 article on “Anastatic Printing,”74 Poe imagines that new printing technology will liberate writers from their dependence on capital by transforming literary production from an industry to a craft. According to Poe, anastatic printing will make publishing less expensive and more flexible because it allows plates to be made directly from manuscript. This in turn will give readers access to a vast array of texts ordinarily suppressed by the Capital Reader, that is, by profitoriented publishers whose decisions are based on salability rather than literary merit. Under normal conditions, the high cost of publishing dooms “many excellent works” to oblivion, because initial investments in stereotype plates can only be recouped for books that sell in larger quantities. Capital—or the lack thereof—is clearly the problem. As Poe explains later in the essay, the advantages of anastatic printing are more apparent if one realizes that “in several of the London publishing warehouses there is deposited in stereotype plates alone, property to the amount of a million sterling” (156). Because of the dramatic reduction of capital costs, Poe predicts that the alternative method of printing will “cheapen information,” “diffuse knowledge and amusement,” and “bring before the public the very class of works which are most valuable, but least in circulation on account of unsaleability” (156). In other words, Poe seeks to escape more than capital itself, more than “the expensive interference of the typesetter, and the often ruinous intervention of the publisher” (157); he also wants to liberate himself from what capital implies, namely dependence on high-volume sales and on the tastes of the literate multitude. In Poe’s political economy, liberation from the Capital Reader meant liberation from both capital and the mass reader, for these were merely two aspects of the same productive process. Having loosened the link between capitalism and signification in the first part of “Anastatic Printing,” Poe commences a series of utopian musings about a new order of literary production. First, Poe believes that authors will again cultivate the art of handwriting, for as explained above, anastatic printing allows impressions to be made directly from the author’s original draft. This, Poe continues, “will tend with an inevitable impetus to every species of improvement in style—more especially in the points of concision and

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distinctness—and this again, in a degree even more noticeable, to precision of thought, and luminous arrangement of matter” (157). Poe also anticipates a number of changes in society at large. The new method of printing will, for example, afford “abundant employment to women,” primarily because “their delicacy of organization” will enable them to replace male type-setters, “whose industry,” Poe naively predicts, “will be diverted perforce into other channels” (158). Most importantly, Poe contends that the reduced need for capital will inspire the emergence of a genuinely democratic publishing industry: The value of every book is a compound of its literary and its physical or mechanical value as the product of physical labor applied to the physical material. But at present the latter value immensely predominates, even in the works of the most esteemed authors. It will be seen, however, that the new condition of things will at once give the ascendancy to the literary value, and thus by their literary value will books come to be estimated among men. The wealthy gentleman of elegant leisure will lose the vantage-ground now afforded him, and will be forced to tilt on terms of equality with the poordevil author. At present the literary world is a species of anomalous Congress, in which the majority of the members are constrained to listen in silence while all the eloquence proceeds from a privileged few. In the new régime, the humblest will speak as often and as freely as the most exalted, and will be sure of receiving just that amount of attention which the intrinsic merit of their speeches may deserve.75

This is a startling declaration, especially when contrasted with the universal image of Poe as an aristocrat manqué. He had once tried to obtain “caste” for his magazine venture by soliciting submissions from, among others, J. P. Kennedy, Judge Robert T. Conrad, and that nemesis of the Jacksonian era, banker Nicholas Biddle. Here, however, Poe casually invokes the rhetoric of Jacksonian democracy against the “privileged” literary elite of the northeast.76 To be sure, this is a democracy of producers only; nowhere does Poe consider extending suffrage to the common reader. His description of the “new régime” nevertheless reveals a utopian vision of a literary republic liberated from the dominion of capital. To facilitate this liberation, Poe first displaces and then overturns the old law of value. As previously suggested, economists ranging from Adam Smith to David Ricardo to Karl Marx distinguish between two primary forms of value: the intrinsic worth or use-value of a commodity, and the market or exchange-value it bears in relation to other commodities. As indicated by his remarks on the law of supply and demand, Poe was keenly aware of this distinction. In “Anastatic Printing,” however, he establishes a different opposition—not between use- and exchange-value, but between that portion of value produced by writers, and that portion of value contributed by raw material, machinery, and manual labor, all of which Poe saw as being controlled by capitalist publishers or “wealthy gentlemen of elegant leisure.” Poe accordingly transforms the technical distinction between literary and physical value


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into a political conflict between the mass of “poordevil” authors and the “privileged few.” Since this inequality has a material basis, Poe hopes that it can be redressed though a technological change in the material process of literary production. In other words, he hopes that anastatic printing will overthrow not only the form of value that dominates the literary commodity, but also the class of people who dominate the literary world.77 If Poe was so adept at conjuring up “new regimes” out of historical and technological materials, it was perhaps because the capitalist North was itself something of an alternative economy, especially when viewed from the perspective of the South. There is wide agreement among historians about the relative backwardness of the Southern economy. This backwardness was manifested in poor transportation, low rates of literacy, a restricted mass-market for consumer goods, an inefficient cash economy, a relatively unsophisticated banking system, a small percentage of people with disposable cash income, and relatively low rates of investment in docks, ports, canals, and railroads. More important than backwardness itself was the perception, by Poe and other Virginia writers, that the South lagged far behind the North, especially in those economic sectors relating to the production of books and periodicals. In an 1836 review of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet for the Messenger, for example, Poe laments the backwardness of the Southern publishing industry: But that the publication will succeed, in the bookselling sense of the word, is problematical. Thanks to the long indulged literary supineness of the South, her presses are not as apt in putting forth a saleable book as her sons are in concocting a wise one. (ER, 779)

In an 1846 review of Simms, Poe repeated this sentiment when he complained of “the southern supineness and general want of tact in all matters relating to the making of money” (ER, 904). In order to overcome this “supineness,” intellectuals associated with the Messenger called for a dramatic transformation in the economic and ideological constraints on Southern publishing.78 James E. Heath—novelist, Virginia state auditor, and first editor of the Messenger—argued that the South must break free from its “dependence” on Northern presses and its “vassalage” to Northern writers.79 In the inaugural issue of the Messenger (August 1834), Heath claimed that the publishing industry deserved special support because of its importance to the development of a distinct Southern identity and ideology. “We are not willing,” Heath points out, “to borrow our political,— religious, or even our agricultural notions from the other side of Mason and Dixon’s line, and we generously patronize various domestic journals devoted to those several subjects.” This being the case, Heath wondered why Virginian readers were willing to “consider the descendants of the pilgrims—of the Hollanders of Manhattan, or the German adventurers of Pennsylvania, as exclusively entitled to cater for us in our choicest intellectual aliment?”

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Distinguishing between textiles and texts, Heath then advocated a program of internal improvements for the Southern mind. Not surprisingly, this program emphasized the primacy of literary production: If we continue to be consumers of northern productions, we shall never ourselves become producers. We may take from them the fabrics of their looms, and give in exchange without loss our agricultural products—but if we depend exclusively upon their literary supplies, it is certain that the spirit of invention among our own sons, will be dampened, if not entirely extinguished. The value of a domestic publication of the kind, consists in its being at once accessible to all who choose to venture into the arena as rivals for renown. It imparts the same energy, and exercises the same influence upon mental improvement, that a railroad does upon agricultural labor, when passing by our doors and through our estates.”80

Before a new economic order can be built, it must first be imagined, and Heath’s visionary editorial was but one of numerous attempts by Southern intellectuals to imagine the material foundations for a distinct and independent culture. Such visions are most powerful when they are still new. Precisely because of the novelty of a Southern publishing industry, Poe was not inclined to view it as an inevitable development; nor would he have looked back to the North as the natural center of a natural order. Instead, necessity and desire compelled him to imagine the capitalist publishing industry as one of many possible economies which might be coaxed into existence. As the intellectuals associated with the Messenger soon discovered, however, there was a great deal of difference between imagining a new economy and building it in reality. In 1839, James Heath was still assisting White at the Messenger, but by this point he had assumed the awkward task of rejecting the very productions he once tried to stimulate. Explaining to one correspondent why White had declined publishing the papers of a former Virginia governor, Heath at first mentioned the excessive length of the submission and the lack of public interest in antiquarian topics. Realizing that this explanation would disappoint his correspondent, Heath then offered his own interpretation: I give you the printer’s view of the subject;—I wish we had energy and enterprise enough in the metropolis of the old Dominion and in the old dominion herself to creep out of the vassalage we are placed in to New-York literature. Why lie! They think no more of us Virginians than if we had been born before the flood!81

His bold plan to develop the Southern publishing industry had apparently come to naught, for five years after calling upon Southerners to “produce” their own “literary supplies,” Heath was still complaining of Virginia’s dependence on New York literature. According to his rather convoluted explanation, the continued “vassalage” of Virginia stems from two causes: the arrogance of the North and the lack of “energy and enterprise” in the South. Aside from redirecting his correspondent’s anger toward a common Northern foe,


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Heath obscures the economic problem by portraying it as a personal conflict between lazy Southerners and insulting Northerners, a conflict that would seem to have more to do with the code of honor than with the mode of production. In another writer, there would have been nothing unusual in such a conventional—and reactionary—rhetorical strategy, but Heath saw himself as a member of a progressive Southern intelligentsia dedicated to leading the region out of its economic backwardness. When he read over the first draft of the letter, he must have realized his inconsistency, because over the words “energy and enterprise” he carefully interlineated a single word: “capital.” Shifting from the discourse of honor to the discourse of political economy, Heath finally named the enemy that would haunt Poe throughout his career as a commercial writer. In this instance, however, the location of the word reveals as much as the word itself. When searching Poe’s texts for the tell-tale signs of capitalist determination, it is important to realize that economic pressures seldom appear as overt themes or topics. More often than not, these pressures must be detected outside of the narrow level of content, either in the grosser world of literary business, or in the subtler realm of literary form. In Poe’s work, as in Heath’s letter, it is often necessary to read capital between the lines. Such a reading would uncover many similarities among Messenger writers, but it would also reveal how starkly Poe’s outlook differed from the civic idealism of Heath and Minor. Poe’s economic imagination had been tempered or deformed by factors already enumerated—poverty, abandonment, mercantile training, literary ambition, and a certain lawless proclivity to take any possibility to its logical extreme. These factors made Poe more sensitive than other intellectuals to what might be termed the intimacy of production, for in the absence of insulating traditions or institutions, it is easier for the creative spirit to discern the horrid laws of political economy. The next chapter in fact demonstrates how the very process of imagining an alternative economy led Poe to imagine an alternative self, a self purged of unprofitable romantic tendencies and recast in the furnace of entrepreneurial capitalism. The material presence of the Capital Reader, in other words, soon gave birth to fantasies of a capital writer.

Chapter Three FABLES OF CIRCULATION POE’S INFLUENCE ON THE MESSENGER

A

LONGSIDE THE MYTH of Poe as a romantic outcast, there has always been a second story, one that tells of a brilliant but underpaid critic who had an uncanny knack for transforming dull magazines into hot properties. According to this account, Poe—still unknown and untested—took control of the struggling Southern Literary Messenger and singlehandedly made it into one of the most famous and lucrative magazines in the country. He did all this, the story continues, without much gratitude from Thomas Willis White, because the prudish proprietor was so busy being scandalized that he failed to appreciate Poe’s unprecedented commercial achievement. Unable to reconcile their differences, the two men parted ways in the end, a separation which returned Poe to undeserved poverty and which condemned the Messenger to White’s plodding and unprofitable control. This general interpretation of the Messenger has today attained universal acceptance, in part because it serves as a kind of tragic fable about the misunderstanding between genius and capitalism. What I shall do here is to trace the history and significance of the magazinist fable from its point of origin to the present. In the course of doing so, I shall present new evidence which challenges both entrepreneurial and romantic stories, thereby enabling the circulation of a less fabulous account of Poe and the industry of letters. The point of this new account is not to show that Poe lied, but instead to explore how generations of critics have misunderstood the true conditions of literary business in antebellum America. In part, then, this chapter aims to sweep away some of the critical sediment which today obscures the historical context in which Poe dreamed about founding his own magazine. This publishing venture—first called Penn Magazine and later The Stylus—was for Poe a desperate and consuming passion; in 1847 he claimed that it was “the grand purpose of my life, from which I have never swerved for a moment” (Letters, 2:333). Though he never succeeded, Poe’s constant struggle to become his own publisher reveals an astute grasp of the economic determinants of literature. Lacking sinecure, inheritance, or institutional support, a writer could rise above mere subsistence only by owning the text and the material commodity which enabled its circulation in the mass market. As one of Poe’s correspondents prophesied, “you [n]ever have been, or ever will be, paid for your intellectual labor . . . until you establish a Magazine of your own” (Poe

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Log, 465). New information about his “grand purpose” should therefore shed light on Poe’s real attitude toward the power of the Capital Reader and the destiny of commercial writers in an emerging capitalist economy.

I. HISTORY OF A FABLE The central “fact” of the magazinist fable involves Poe’s impact on circulation and sales. John Henry Ingram, Poe’s first English biographer, helped establish the standard position with his influential 1880 study: Within little more than a twelve-month from Poe’s appointment . . . as sole editor, the circulation increased from seven hundred to nearly five thousand—an increase quite unparalleled at that time in the history of this class of magazines. The success was, of course, due to the originality and fascination of Poe’s stories, and the fearlessness of his trenchant critiques.1

In 1902, J. A. Harrison repeated these figures—700 to 5000—in the biography that commences the nineteen-volume “Virginia” edition of Poe’s works. But in 1909, George Woodberry used more conservative estimates to retell the Messenger story. According to Woodberry, Poe “had proved his capacity by helping, in his sphere of the enterprise, to make the Messenger the good investment it was; its circulation had gone from five hundred to thirty-five hundred copies.”2 The difference between these figures should have raised questions about evidence and method. Curiously, however, there has never been any serious attempt to establish the actual circulation of the Messenger, nor has there been much concern expressed over the conflicting figures. The most recent comment on the disparity appeared more than fifty years ago in a footnote to Hervey Allen’s Israfel. Allen first draws attention to the problem: “Prof. J. A. Harrison . . . gives the increase of subscribers on the Messenger as from seven hundred to five thousand. Prof. Woodberry is more conservative and puts the last figure at thirty-five hundred.” Then, without citing any evidence whatsoever, Allen asserts that “the last is correct.”3 In 1941, this position gained additional authority from Arthur Hobson Quinn, whose meticulous biography repeated the conservative Woodberry figures.4 Since the beginning of modern American literary scholarship, in other words, there have existed two conflicting estimates for the circulation of the Messenger, but despite the discrepancy, and despite the absence of collateral documentation, both estimates have been offered as conclusive proof of Poe’s uncanny ability to transmute genius into gold. As a case study in evidence and ideology, the Messenger story has broad implications, especially since the circulation figures appear in almost all contemporary descriptions of Poe’s literary and editorial career. Recent accounts citing the conservative estimate include Vincent Buranelli’s book on Poe for

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the Twayne’s United States Authors Series; David Galloway’s Introduction to Penguin Classics’ edition of Poe; Scribner’s American Writers; Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia; the World Book Encyclopedia; and Jeffrey Meyers’ 1992 biography of Poe. Sources still relying on the higher figures include Michael Allen’s Poe and the British Magazine Tradition; Julian Symons’ The Tell-Tale Heart; and Kenneth Silverman’s 1991 Poe biography. Some accounts avoid specific numbers and instead refer to geometrical increases in circulation. In the Columbia Literary History of the United States, for example, G. R. Thompson reports that Poe “increased its circulation sixfold in his brief period of editorship”; and in The Heath Anthology of American Literature, William Goldhurst asserts that “Poe’s work for the Southern Literary Messenger increased the circulation tenfold.” Many sources eschew numbers altogether and simply allude to “swift” or “dramatic” increases. Included in this latter group are The Norton Anthology of American Literature; the Oxford Companion to American Literature; the Cambridge Guide to English Literature; the Reader’s Companion to American History; the chronologies for both Poe volumes in the Library of America series; and the electronic versions of Grolier’s Encyclopedia and Academic American Encyclopedia. Most importantly, whether one turns to biographies, reference works, critical introductions, or electronic databases, it is impossible to find any dissenting interpretation of Poe’s influence on the Messenger. By direct or silent assent, all sources confirm Ingram’s 1880 claim that Poe achieved “an increase quite unparalleled at that time in the history of this class of magazines.” Nevertheless, it is difficult to know what to make of the various figures bandied about, in part because accounting and distribution methods have changed significantly since the 1830s. White sold entire (yearly) volumes rather than individual (monthly) issues, and although he asked to be paid in advance, he often did not receive payment until many issues had been delivered. Some subscribers made a habit of sending in payments only after an entire volume had been sent, some waited years to settle their accounts, and some “subscribers” received the Messenger for as many as four years without making a single payment.5 Circulation numbers for antebellum magazines, moreover, might refer to copies sold in a given month, copies of a specific issue sold in a year or in several years, copies distributed, copies printed, or total copies read, a figure that was obviously subject to manipulation. In other words, the Messenger story is riddled with ambiguities and inconsistencies, ranging from the number (3,500, 5,000, or sometimes 5,500), to the object counted (issues printed, distributed, sold, or read), to the method of counting (monthly figures, annual reports, exact statistics, estimates, or averages), to the cause of the purported increase (by which I mean the assumption that every new purchaser was attracted by Poe’s book reviews and reprinted tales rather than by the material that made up the bulk of each issue). This last


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assumption, a variant of the “great man” view of history, distorts the actual conditions of magazine production and obscures many important issues regarding labor, profits, and intellectual property. Obviously, by the time an issue of the Messenger emerged as a material commodity, it was no longer the work of a single author; it was instead the product of many hands, including writers, editors, reviewers, distributors, printers, typesetters, proofreaders and subscription agents, not to mention the numerous supporters who made up a kind of informal advertising network. Essentially, then, the stories about Poe’s editorial abilities start with a possible correlation between a product of collective labor and a statistic of uncertain meaning, and they transform this possible correlation into something very different, namely a causal relationship between the efforts of a lone editor and the preferences—or the effective demand—of all new subscribers. A more devastating weakness in the Messenger fable involves the source of the circulation figures. Curiously, neither Ingram, Harrison, Woodberry, Allen, nor Quinn provides any documentation for what are purported to be authoritative statistics. The high estimates, however, clearly come from Poe himself. Several of his claims are quoted at length below, because they hold a peculiar interest for anyone investigating the political economy of literature. One particularly important passage appears in Poe’s 1844 letter to Charles Anthon. Attempting to attract Anthon’s support for the Stylus, Poe gives a brief history of his career as a daring and successful magazinist: But not to trust too implicitly to à priori reasonings, and at the same time to make myself thoroughly master of all details which might avail me concerning the mere business of publication, I entered a few steps into the field of experiment. I joined the “Messenger” as you know which was then in its 2d year with 700 subscribers & the general outcry was that because a Magazine had never succeeded South of the Potomac therefore a Magazine never cd succeed. Yet in despite of this & in despite of the wretched taste of its proprietor which hampered & controlled me at all points I . . . increased the circulation in 15 months to 5,500 subscribers paying an annual profit of 10,000 when I left. This number was never exceeded by the journal which rapidly went down & may now be said to be extinct. (Letters, 1:269)

What emerges here is a picture of an innovative entrepreneur eager to transform magazines into more rational—and therefore more profitable—business ventures. But (the story continues) since the obtuse proprietor did not recognize genius, even when it served his best interests, Poe was forced to seek capital without capitalist control, if only to valorize capital more efficiently. Poe’s correspondence is seldom subjected to extended critical scrutiny, but the Anthon letter nevertheless reveals a commercial author engaged in the deadly serious business of self-fashioning. Contrary to the general claims of New Historicism, however, Poe’s self-fashioning seems to have been less

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influenced by “cultural institutions”—family, church, state—than by the material pressures of a developing capitalist economy.6 These material pressures compelled Poe to represent himself as an editorial entrepreneur rather than a romantic artist. Romanticism, of course, was never a stranger to capitalism. As Raymond Williams has demonstrated, the first Romantic poets saw no absolute conflict between the pursuit of art and participation in worldly affairs; only later in the nineteenth century was romanticism assumed to entail a dissociation between art and society, or between poetic sentiment and political struggle.7 In his own time and place, Poe confronted and sometimes defied this general dissociation, not so much to support broad social reforms, but rather to defend the material interests of impoverished literary producers. Poe accordingly depicted writing as a skilled trade designed to achieve a specific, measurable effect.8 On occasion he even supported partisan attempts to reconcile artistic sentiment and capitalist society, as when he endorsed Henry F. Chorley’s plan to rehabilitate romantic artists into “useful citizens, affectionate husbands, faithful friends” (ER, 165). Despite such attempts, however, the editorial entrepreneur remained a qualitatively different kind of being, forged by different pressures, motivated by different passions. The economic imperative to fashion a more marketable self therefore induced Poe to emphasize or invent new “facts” about his past, and although many such facts were later discarded, the Messenger’s circulation statistics went on to become permanent entries in his professional résumé. In the 1845 Broadway Journal, for example, Poe softens his portrait of White, but he retains the glowing account of the Messenger’s commercial success: The Messenger was founded in the beginning of the year 1835, by Thomas W. White, a very worthy and energetic printer and publisher of Richmond Va., at a period when no journal of the kind had ever taken root south of the Potomac, and amid loud warnings from the publisher’s friends not to engage in the undertaking. He persevered, however, and, by dint of much personal exertion, obtained, in the first six months, about six or seven hundred subscribers. . . . At the beginning of the seventh month one of the present editors of the “Broadway Journal” made an arrangement to edit the “Messenger,” and by a systematic exertion on the part of both publisher and editor the circulation was increased by the end of the subsequent year to nearly five thousand—a success quite unparalleled in the history of our five dollar Magazines. After the secession of Mr. Poe, Mr. White took the editorial conduct upon his own shoulders and sustained it remarkably well.9

Poe treats White more respectfully because he is addressing a more public forum. For the same reason, he attempts to trumpet his editorial achievements without appearing to engage in self-promotion, and one of the best ways to brag without looking like a braggart is to cite “objective” statistics. Poe understood, however, that his self-promotion would still be obvious to some readers. When “Outis” accused him of being too harsh in his reviews, Poe


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defended himself by recalling the success of the Messenger, only this time he acknowledged the “egotism” of the story: I will now unscrupulously call the attention of the Outises to the fact, that it was during what they (the Outises) would insinuate to be the unpopularity of my “wholesale mangling of the victims without rhyme and reason” that, in one year, the circulation of the “Southern Messenger” (a five-dollar journal) extended itself from seven hundred to nearly five thousand,—and that, in little more than twice the same time, “Graham’s Magazine” swelled its list from five to fifty-two thousand subscribers. I make no apology for these egotisms, and I proceed with them without hesitation—for, in myself, I am but defending a set of principles which no honest man need be ashamed of defending, and for whose defence no honest man will consider an apology required.10

He sometimes attempted to insinuate the Messenger story more subtly into his writings. In a sketch for “The Literati of New York City,” Poe praises George H. Colton for his work as originator and editor of the American Review. Because of Colton’s “genius,” circulation of the American had climbed to 2,500. “So marked and immediate success,” Poe adds casually, “has never been attained by any of our five dollar magazines, with the exception of ‘The Southern Literary Messenger,’ which, in the course of nineteen months, (subsequent to the seventh from its commencement,) attained a circulation of rather more than five thousand” (ER, 1122). This offhanded reference helps confirm a certain pattern, for whether he did it boldly, slyly, or “unscrupulously,” Poe always put a distinctive spin on the circulation statistics, using them to document his transformation from a visionary artist into a practical magazinist. All of the high circulation estimates can be traced to the sources quoted above; the conservative estimates have a more obscure origin. On February 25 and March 4, 1843, the Philadelphia Saturday Museum published a long biographical account of Poe. Attributed to Henry B. Hirst, Philadelphia lawyer, sometime poet, and friend of Poe, the biography was reprinted in several periodicals and served as a key document in the construction of Poe’s public image. Today, the first part of the biography is notorious as an example of romantic myth-making. Among other errors, it reports that Poe had traveled to Greece “with the wild design of aiding in the Revolution then taking place”; that he proceeded to St. Petersburg, where passport difficulties necessitated intervention by the American Consul; that his application to West Point had been backed by Chief Justice John Marshall; that he had published, under a nom-de-plume, an undisclosed work of fiction; and that he had contributed numerous unsigned articles to French and British periodicals. In Hirst’s defense, it should be noted that he is not really to blame for these Byronic embellishments; according to T. O. Mabbott, “the life is full of inaccuracies and fictions undoubtedly emanating from Poe himself.”11

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The second part of the biography, however, constructs a different Poe; instead of depicting him as a wayward and reckless romantic, it refashions him into a shrewd commercial editor. Not surprisingly, this portion of the sketch emphasizes Poe’s influence on the Messenger: Mr. Poe was invited by Mr. White to edit the “Southern Literary Messenger” which was then in its seventh month, with about four hundred subscribers. He remained with this journal until the end of its second year, by which time its circulation had increased to between three and four thousand; which latter number, it is believed, the Magazine never afterwards exceeded—if it did not immediately and permanently decrease upon Mr. P’s. secession. The success of the “Messenger” has been on all hands attributed to his exertions in its behalf, but, especially, to the skill, honesty and audacity of the criticism under the editorial head.12

Most scholars accept this account of the Messenger even though they know that the rest of the biography is full of falsehoods. A. H. Quinn, for example, acknowledges the presence of many erroneous claims, but he nevertheless asserts that “Poe’s connection with the Messenger is correctly stated” (373). This is an important claim, for it reveals that Hirst is the authority for the conservative statistics cited by Woodberry, Allen, Quinn, and countless others. But there has never been any independent verification of Hirst’s figures, and it is quite possible that Hirst got his data, and perhaps his entire text, directly from Poe. In order to appreciate Poe’s hand in the biography, it is necessary to reconstruct the precise chain of events. Before selecting Hirst, Poe had initially offered the task to his friend Frederick W. Thomas. To aid in the project, Poe sent Thomas a set of biographical notes, but Thomas doubted the accuracy of this information and politely declined Poe’s request. After Thomas returned the notes, Poe passed them along to Hirst, and Hirst in turn claimed that the information had actually come from Thomas, thereby affording Poe a measure of what is today called plausible deniability.13 As Poe explained to Thomas, “I put into [Hirst’s] hands your package, as returned, and he has taken the liberty of stating his indebtedness for memoranda to yourself—a slight extension of the truth for which I pray you to excuse him” (Letters, 1:224). Thomas may have been disturbed by this “slight extension” of the truth, for he later confronted Poe about the fabrications contained in the notes: Poe sent me the notes for the Museum biography, but I evaded writing them. I told him afterwards that I knew more of his history than he had sent me. He was amused, and laughed the matter off by confessing that the story was intended to help the magazine project.14

The entire “story” must therefore be seen as a part of a deliberate marketing strategy for the Stylus. Attempting to capture both imaginations and investments, Poe vaunts the reckless exploits of his romantic youth in the first part of his biography, but then, citing the Messenger statistics, he celebrates a re-


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habilitation which seems to have been wrought by the healing power of the entrepreneurial spirit. Whether or not he planned it all in advance, the chain of events reveals that in telling his second story, Poe knowingly piled deception upon deception. This accumulation of deceptions casts doubt on all existing accounts of Poe and the Messenger. Nor does it matter whether such accounts rely on the high or the “conservative” circulation figures, for the circumstances surrounding the Hirst biography reveal that both sets of dramatic statistics, and therefore all stories of Poe’s dramatic achievement, are ultimately derived from Poe himself.

II. FROM FABLE TO FACT This in itself should cast doubt on claims of a “startling” or “unparalleled” increase in circulation. But since the story is so widely told, and since it performs so many ideological functions, nothing short of a definitive set of statistics can possibly overturn it. Such statistics are notoriously difficult to obtain, especially for antebellum periodicals. Surprisingly, there does exist one reliable source for the circulation of the Messenger, but until now this source has been completely overlooked. In order to save on the cost of mailing receipts, and perhaps to engage in name-dropping, Thomas White regularly printed a “List of Payments” that identified all individuals who had paid for subscriptions in the interval preceding publication. The lists appeared on the inside covers of the Messenger along with various notices and advertisements. Because the covers were printed on poor quality paper, they were generally removed before monthly issues were bound into annual volumes, but the Virginia Historical Society does hold a set of the Messenger with a nearly complete series of covers. Due to the visibility and commercial function of these lists, White compiled and corrected them with extreme care.15 And unlike estimates of total readers or total copies printed, these lists were relatively resistant to manipulation or falsification. By counting every name on every List of Payments published between 1834 and 1843, I was able to obtain the most precise set of data on Messenger circulation now in existence. In order to compare the actual paid subscription with the high and low estimates normally given, it is necessary to establish when Poe began and ended his editorial connection with the Messenger. Although his reviews began appearing as early as April 1835, Poe did not arrive in Richmond to assume regular duties until August 1835. Shortly thereafter, he “flew the track” to see Virginia and Maria Clemm in Baltimore, but he returned to Richmond in early October, several days after the publication of the last issue of Volume 1.16 Significantly, the cover for the September issue contains no List of Payments, presumably due to a normal decline in remittances at the end of a volume. The first issue of Volume 2, dated December 1835, therefore marks the beginning

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of the period when Poe’s editorial efforts could have exerted any real influence over the circulation of the Messenger. The end of Poe’s editorship can also be established with precision. In November 1836 White returned from a business trip to New York hoping that Poe would have the twelfth and final issue of Volume 2 ready; instead, he found his home and business in a shambles: Money is very scarce here—Times very hard—and, what is still worse, I have a very sick wife,—and “to mend the matter” my Printing is nearly suspended, in consequence of as serious as foolish strike of the young men Printers,—a strike that will in all probability prevent my issuing the 1st. No. of my 3d Volume earlier than the 1st February.17

Poe’s culpability in all of this is not clear, but it certainly did not enhance his tenuous position. He and White had already quarreled over matters of taste, temperament, job performance, and drinking; these quarrels, along with general financial troubles, led to Poe’s dismissal. The actual dismissal probably occurred on January 3, 1837, between the last issue of Volume 2 and the first issue of Volume 3.18 Thus the period of Poe’s editorship coincides almost exactly with the dates of Volume 2, and his influence can be measured by comparing the circulation of the second volume with previous and especially with succeeding years. Such a comparison reveals that Poe grossly and intentionally misrepresented his impact on the Messenger. Paid circulation did not increase from 700 to 5,500, nor even from 500 to 3,500, but rather from 1,298 to 1,814.19 Moreover, circulation did not “immediately and permanently decrease upon Mr. P’s. secession.” Instead, it enjoyed a general upward trend throughout the late 1830s and early 1840s, even though the country was then in the midst of a depression. The upward trend continues even when circulation is defined as the total annual sales of all subscriptions (payments for previous and future volumes included). In 1836, for example, White recorded 1,750 payments for subscriptions to the Messenger; in 1838 this figure increased to 1,998, and in 1841 payments reached a high of 2,506. In other words, revenue from subscription sales increased from $8,750 in 1836 to $12,530 in 1841. The magnitude of Poe’s exaggeration is evident in Figure 3.1, which charts the paid circulation of the Messenger from 1835 to 1842. I anticipate a number of objections here. First, it might be argued that Poe was using a softer and larger set of numbers, such as total copies printed, total distributed, or even total readers. But an accounting method which inflates the figures for Volume 2 must also inflate the figures for previous and succeeding volumes, thereby changing the specific values but not the overall magnitude of Poe’s falsification. It could also be argued that Poe had a residual beneficial impact on sales, so that later increases might be viewed as the fruit


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Image Not Available

Figure 3.1. Southern Literary Messenger Paid Circulation.

of his editorial labors. This line of argument, however, hurts Poe more than it helps him because sales declined in the year immediately following his editorship, and reached their peak long after his departure. Finally, some might still find evidence of Poe’s commercial brilliance in the increased circulation from Volume 1 to 2, an achievement presumably confirmed by the levelling off of sales during 1837. There are two problems with this claim. First, it is natural—and necessary—for a new magazine to enjoy a substantial increase in circulation between the first and second year of operation; in the absence of such an increase, the magazine would probably not survive. Second, the levelling off of circulation during the third full year of operation undoubtedly had less to do with Poe’s departure than with the general economic pressures accompanying the Panic of 1837. Evidence for this can be found in the figures for back orders, which comprised a substantial portion of total sales throughout the history of the Messenger. By adding the original sales of a volume to back payments for that volume during successive years, one can arrive at a final sales figure which corrects somewhat for short-term market fluctuations. If Poe’s editorship really had produced a more marketable commodity, one would expect to find that the final sales figures for Volume 2 were higher than the final totals for other volumes. But the statistics demonstrate that there was no special demand for Poe’s volume. As indicated by Figure 3.2, final sales figures gradually increased from the first volume through the sixth, and then declined during the two years immediately preceding White’s death.

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Image Not Available

Figure 3.2. Southern Literary Messenger Total Sales.

Taken as a whole, these new statistics refute the universally accepted story about Poe’s influence on the circulation of the Messenger. First, Poe did not take over a foundering magazine; the Messenger was in fact doing quite well when Poe arrived in Richmond. Second, circulation of the Messenger did not decline after Poe’s departure. From 1837 until his death in 1843, White ran the Messenger without an official editor, relying instead on the unpaid labor of friends and supporters. During this same period, circulation of the Messenger increased significantly, far exceeding sales during Poe’s editorship. White therefore achieved a drastic reduction in editorial expenses while increasing gross revenues from $5,000 in 1835 to over $12,000 in 1841, even though the country was then in the throes of a depression. So despite his “poor” literary taste, and despite all the assertions by literary scholars, Thomas White did in fact know his business very well. The third and final point concerns the pervasive depiction of Poe as a commercially successful yet underpaid editor and writer. Contrary to all claims, sales under Poe’s editorship did not increase by 600 or 685 percent, but only by 39 percent, which is not all that impressive for a new magazine. Furthermore, the data derived from the Lists of Payments indicate that Poe was not responsible for even this modest increase, because over the long run, magazine sales were more highly correlated with White’s control than with Poe’s editorship.20 The implications are inescapable. During the period of the magazine’s greatest commercial success, Poe was essentially an irrelevant variable; he may have written interesting reviews, but he had no significant impact on the circulation of the Messenger.


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Even without the actual sales figures, Poe left enough evidence to cast doubt on his inflated claims. He was, for instance, openly skeptical of the circulation estimates made by other editors. Lewis Gaylord Clark boasted that he had increased circulation of the Knickerbocker from 500 to over 4,000, figures which of course closely parallel Poe’s own claims for the Messenger. Nevertheless, in an 1845 notice for the Broadway Journal, Poe belittles both the quality and the circulation of Clark’s magazine: The Knickerbocker Magazine, for November, is really beneath notice and beneath contempt. And yet this work was, at one time, respectable. We should regret, for the sake of New York literature, that a journal of this kind should perish, and through sheer imbecility on the part of its conductors. Its present circulation, we believe, is not more than 1400 at the most. Its friends should come to its rescue.21

Poe offers a more caustic attack on inflated circulation estimates in “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.” In the story, Thingum Bob inserts notices— which are really paid advertisements—of his poem “On the Oil-of-Bob” into various newspapers and journals. The notices praise the two-line poem in progressively exalted terms. In addition, each successive advertisement contains a higher—and more outrageous—circulation figure for the Lollipop, the imaginary magazine in which the poem supposedly appeared. The first notice mentions that the Lollipop “has a circulation of 100,000, and its subscription list has increased one fourth during the last month” (PT, 776). The second advertisement reports that the Lollipop “has a circulation of 200,000, and its subscription list has increased one third during the last fortnight” (777). The third paid notice claims that the magazine “has a circulation of 300,000; and its subscription list has increased one half within the last week” (778). The final advertisement reports that the Lollipop “has a circulation of precisely half a million, and its subscription list has increased seventy-five per cent. within the last couple of days” (779). Significantly, “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.” was first published in 1844, which means that Poe was inflating his own circulation figures even while he was satirizing other writers for engaging in the same practice.22 The precise chronology of Poe’s claims is also significant. For six years after he left Richmond, he made no statement whatsoever about the circulation of the Messenger. But on 19 January 1843 (Poe’s thirty-third birthday), Thomas Willis White died of complications from a stroke. Approximately one month later, on 25 February 1843, the Hirst biography appeared, asserting that Poe had increased circulation of the Messenger from 400 to “between three and four thousand.” Emboldened by this first lie, Poe went on to make other, more exaggerated claims in his own voice, but of course by then Thomas White was no longer around to expose the falsehood. This interpretation of Poe’s timing is confirmed by the difference between the 1840 prospectus for Penn Magazine

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and the 1843 prospectus for the Stylus. In 1840 he is almost apologetic about his previous connection with the Messenger: I will be pardoned for speaking more directly of The Messenger. Having in it no proprietary right, my objects too being at variance in many respects with those of its very worthy owner, I found difficulty in stamping upon its pages that individuality which I believe essential to the full success of all similar publications. (ER, 1024)

In the 4 March 1843 prospectus for the Stylus, which was published in the same newspaper as Hirst’s biography, Poe gives a much more glowing account of past editorial experiences: The necessity for any very rigid definition of the literary character or aims of “The Stylus,” is, in some measure, obviated by the general knowledge, on the part of the public, of the editor’s connexion, formerly, with the two most successful periodicals in the country—“The Southern Literary Messenger,” and “Graham’s Magazine.” Having no proprietary right, however, in either of these journals; his objects, too, being, in many respects, at variance with those of their very worthy owners; he found it not only impossible to effect anything, on the score of taste, for the mechanical appearance of the works, but exceedingly difficult, also, to stamp, upon their internal character, that individuality which he believes essential to the full success of all similar publications. (ER, 1034)

The difference between these accounts helps to clarify Poe’s motive for exaggerating his success with the Messenger. Because the earlier prospectus had failed in its purpose, Poe was undoubtedly casting about for new ways to represent himself and his editorial capabilities. The example of Graham’s, a magazine famous for its high circulation, probably inspired Poe to falsify the Messenger figures. As noted already, this inspiration did not take effect immediately: although he had been associated with Graham’s since the beginning of 1841, he waited until White’s death in 1843 to proclaim the Messenger one of the “two most successful periodicals in the country.” Once the lie was out, however, Poe used it to re-fashion himself as a successful editorial entrepreneur. The earliest misrepresentation occurred at the commencement of a magazine campaign, and the last appeared in Poe’s 1849 letter to a financial backer.23 Viewed in conjunction with his other misrepresentations, the prospectus for the Stylus indicates that Poe was not engaging in idle bragging; he was instead trying to attract readers, contributors, and especially investors. From the very beginning, then, the story about the profitability of genius was a ruse aimed at capital itself. In Chapter One, I described Poe’s audience as being composed of three distinct segments: the elite group of sympathetic or Ideal Readers; the large, unworthy, and vaguely ominous mass of Feared Readers; and the profit-driven assessors of salability that, following James Kirke Paulding, I have designated as Capital Readers. Poe’s desire to dupe or manipulate the literate masses has often been noted, but his maga-


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zine campaign reveals that he also intended to lure one Capital Reader away from the calculating pack, primarily by disseminating a set of erroneous statistics. This strategy should come as no surprise; as Poe himself admitted, it was his “great object” to secure “a partner possessing ample capital, and, at the same time, so little self-esteem, as to allow me entire control of the editorial conduct.”24

III. THE CIRCULATION OF IDEOLOGY Unfortunately for Poe, the ruse failed to attract investors, but it did succeed in duping literary critics and historians for 150 years. Above I alluded to the possible ideological causes for the naive acceptance of Poe’s claims. Now that his claims have been exposed as lies, it is possible to investigate the critical repercussions, for interpretations that live by false statistics must also die by them. Woven into most interpretations of Poe and the Messenger are three related ideological threads: that economic success results from heroic individual effort; that artistic intelligence can be translated into market savvy; and that Poe—like most intellectual workers—was unjustly underpaid for his efforts. The most blatant depiction of Poe as heroic individualist comes from Sidney Moss: Alone, he had harried and defied the powerful literary clique of New York and defended himself against the editorial powers of the South, to emerge triumphant and with reputation. Subscriptions to the Messenger were mounting impressively; money was pouring into White’s coffers; Poe had made the new Southern monthly a leading national magazine; and accolades from established authors were being showered upon him.25

Poe would scarcely have recognized himself in this account. He had certainly opposed segments of the Northeastern literary establishment, but he had hardly emerged “triumphant and with reputation.” After leaving Richmond Poe traveled to New York, but his only job prospect failed to pan out, and he was unable to find any other steady work. To compound his financial woes, the Panic of 1837 commenced shortly after he arrived in the city. His “defiant” reviews therefore alienated prospective employers at the worst possible moment, and according to eyewitnesses, the Poe family spent the next several years in dire poverty, “suffering from want of food” and forced to subsist “on bread and molasses for weeks together” (Poe Log, 248). The Messenger, moreover, was enduring its own hardships in the period immediately preceding Poe’s departure, and he undoubtedly believed he was escaping a magazine that was sinking into a state of “great confusion.”26 Between November 1836 and January 1837, White complained of delays, strikes, dwindling finances, hard times, and mounting debts. When Poe fled north these complaints must

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have been ringing in his ears, which perhaps explains why he gave such a muted description of the Messenger in the 1840 prospectus. But even if the Messenger had been utterly triumphant, Poe’s constant quest for funding and assistance would belie all assertions about singlehanded success. Poe’s desire to stamp his “individuality” on a magazine was in fact an oblique acknowledgment of the collective nature of publishing. He knew from bitter experience that no magazine could survive without a veritable army of investors, editorial collaborators, contributors, and subscribers, not to mention the large group of paid laborers who were required to bring the magazine into material existence. The second ideological thread concerns Poe’s ability to master the literary market through daring strategy and shrewd manipulation of the mass audience. Poe attempted to present himself this way on numerous occasions, as when he told Charles Anthon of his discovery that “the country from its very constitution, could not fail of affording in a few years, a larger proportionate amount of readers than any upon the Earth,” and that the “energetic, busy spirit of the age tended wholly to the Magazine literature—to the curt, the terse, the well-timed, and the readily diffused, in preference to the old forms of the verbose and ponderous.”27 Rejecting his previous image as a romantic outcast, Poe here refashions himself as a practical visionary with a keen eye for market trends and new investment opportunities. A contemporary version of this refashioning can be found in Vincent Buranelli: Sitting in an editorial chair, [Poe] was industrious beyond most of his competitors; nor did he wildly dissipate his energy into the wasteland of neurosis, but rather channeled it very effectively toward the end set by himself and his publishers. His practical triumph was sealed by the increase in circulation in the journals he guided: the Southern Literary Messenger jumped from 500 subscribers to 3,500; Graham’s Magazine, from 5,000 to 40,000. He had a hard pragmatic sense of what the public was prepared to pay for, and he gave it what it wanted.28

This is not the place for a full investigation of Graham’s, but several points should be noted in passing. First, Poe was only the book review editor, not, as many assume, the editor-in-chief. Second, Poe was either unwilling or unable to sell the Graham’s audience “what it wanted.” George Graham had developed a fairly sophisticated method of estimating the popularity of his contributors; depending on how frequently their works were reprinted in Western and Southern magazines, writers were paid on a sliding scale ranging from $2.00 to $12.00 per page. On this scale Poe rated only $4.00 per page, which prompted Graham to observe that “the character of Poe’s mind was of such an order, as not to be very widely in demand” (Michael Allen, Poe and the British Magazine Tradition, 158). Finally, the reference to Poe’s “practical triumph” ignores the real poverty, anger, and desperation of his literary career. It also ignores a substantial portion of Poe’s criticism, for in these writings he often resisted or attacked the power of the mass literary market. In a review for


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Graham’s, Poe in fact argued that popularity “is evidence of a book’s demerit, inasmuch as it shows a ‘stooping to conquer’—inasmuch as it shows that the author has dealt largely, if not altogether, in matters which are susceptible of appreciation by the mass of mankind—by uneducated thought, by uncultivated taste, by unrefined and unguided passion” (ER, 312). Yet even writers with mass appeal were poorly requited for their pains, and this leads to the final ideological thread of the Messenger story, namely that Poe was not merely unappreciated but, even worse, underpaid. The best statement of this position comes from David Galloway’s Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Poe’s works: Nonetheless, had Poe ever received appropriate compensation for his editorial work, he could have been freed from financial worry. During the two years he edited the Southern Literary Messenger its circulation increased from 500 to 3,500, while his salary only inched beyond the ten dollars a week, plus occasional extras, at which he had originally been hired. . . . Despite rumours of “intemperance” and the fact that Poe’s own cherished ideals about magazine publication often clashed with those of the owner for whom he worked, the real index of his success and dependability as an editor rests in the verifiable facts of the subscription lists and in Poe’s correspondence with contributors and rivals: the inescapable conclusion is that one of America’s most brilliant and imaginative editors was one of its most grossly underpaid.29

It turns out, of course, that “the verifiable facts of the subscription lists” are not so verifiable after all.30 But even if Poe had been responsible for huge profits, it would still be misleading to portray him as the victim of some unusual or exceptional economic transaction. No proper capitalist would pay workers for all the value they produce; as most workers know, proper capitalists pay as little as they can get away with and pocket the rest. From the perspective of capital, in other words, “appropriate compensation” consists of the minimum wages required to keep workers alive and productive, and in this sense Poe was certainly not underpaid. Nor was Poe underpaid from the perspective of classical political economy, for the supply of editors and writers was more than adequate to the effective demand. Blaming individual proprietors merely obscures the root cause of Poe’s suffering. Thomas White and George Graham were not lone exploiters; they were in fact representative capitalists motivated less by personal enmity than by the need to valorize their capital. This does not mean that Poe’s poverty was somehow just. Instead, it indicates that economic inequality is an inherent condition of capitalism itself, which in turn suggests that one cannot really lament Poe’s poverty without also lamenting the entire economic order which routinely sentenced commercial writers to hard labor in the “Magazine Prison-House.” When Poe tried to enlist George Graham as a backer of Penn Magazine, he discovered how difficult it was to rise from inmate to jailer, much less to escape the prison-house altogether. Poe started working for Graham’s

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Magazine in 1841; at the commencement of his employment, Graham had apparently agreed to support the Penn at some later date. This support, however, never materialized. The offer may have been misunderstood, or Graham may have simply broken his word, but for Poe the episode exposed a deeper conflict between the “man of capital” and the commercial writer: You may remember that it was my original design to issue it on the first of January 1841. I was induced to abandon the project at that period by the representations of Mr. Graham. He said that if I would join him as a salaried editor, giving up, for the time, my own scheme, he himself would unite with me at the expiration of 6 months, or certainly at the end of a year. As Mr. G. was a man of capital and I had no money, I thought it most prudent to fall in with his views. The result has proved his want of faith and my own folly. In fact, I was continually laboring against myself. Every exertion made by myself for the benefit of “Graham,” by rendering that Mag: a greater source of profit, rendered its owner, at the same time, less willing to keep his word with me. At the time of our bargain (a verbal one) he had 6000 subscribers—when I left him he had more than 40,000. It is no wonder that he has been tempted to leave me in the lurch. (Letters, 1:205)

Poe here presents himself as a prisoner of his own success, for as long as he lacked capital, his efforts to increase magazine circulation would only make Graham wealthier and warier of competition. In effect, then, the fruit of Poe’s labor confronted him as an enemy power, and his lifelong struggle to establish a magazine must therefore be seen as an attempt to regain control over his own creative activity. It is quite possible, of course, that Poe also wished to regain the self which had been suppressed by the Capital Reader; the prospectuses for both the Stylus and Penn in fact emphasize his desire to stamp upon these magazines a certain salable “individuality.” But whether the final product would reflect an authentic self or one fashioned expressly for the market, Poe realized that under the emerging conditions of mass culture, individuality had itself become a prerogative of capital.

IV. CONCLUSION Our fable comes full circle. Between his editorship of the Messenger and the appearance of the Hirst biography, Poe had begun to refashion himself in response to twin tendencies of the new publishing environment: on the one hand, rising sales brought the commercial writer into contact with vast scores of readers; on the other hand, capitalist proprietors exercised such control over literature that the author was distorted beyond recognition into what Poe elsewhere called “a cipher.” He accordingly struggled to evade capitalist control—and the exploitative wage relation between writer and proprietor—by founding his own magazine. This strategy still required money, but Poe hoped


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that he could raise it from better sources than Thomas White, George Graham, or the Brothers Harper, all of whom appeared to be guided by the exacting judgments of the same Capital Reader. In order to attract new investors and thereby to circumvent the power of established proprietors, Poe tried to portray himself as a unique productive force capable of turning a fledgling magazine into one of the “most successful periodicals in the country.” This in turn impelled him to lie about his experience with the Messenger. The success of Graham’s alone could be attributed to a number of causes, but if Graham’s and the Messenger both achieved dramatic increases in circulation, then Poe could represent himself as a revenue-generating genius unlike all other literary laborers. The oft-repeated Messenger story must therefore be seen as a deliberate act of deception, for all of the evidence indicates that Poe refashioned himself in a cautious and calculating manner, first waiting until White had died, and then relying upon his friend Hirst to introduce the falsehood to the public. By following this strategy, however, Poe risked turning himself into a kind of capital writer, for he could not deliver on his claims without acquiescing to the logic—and perhaps the interpretive conventions—of the dominant economic order. And yet, his very lack of capital gave him a critical perspective on the new conditions of literary production. Early in his career, Poe had claimed that the effect of his writing “will be estimated better by the circulation of the Magazine than by any comments upon its contents,” but years of hard labor in the publishing industry made him dubious of such cavalier applications of economic doctrine. His later writings in fact exhibit a growing impatience with all attempts to disguise the poverty of authorship, whether through exalted portraits of the romantic artist or through equally mystified fables of the editorial entrepreneur. What really set Poe apart, then, was not his profitable genius, but instead his ability to imagine the literary implications of an emerging capitalist order and his willingness to manipulate, albeit unsuccessfully, the peculiar logic that this new order was insinuating into the culture at large. None of this is apparent, however, if one gives credence to the myths about Poe’s miraculous influence on the Southern Literary Messenger. Nor would Poe himself have been forced to confront the systemic character of his predicament if he had simply been mistreated or misunderstood by a few aberrant capitalists. As indicated by these new statistics, Poe knew all along that his daring reviews did not produce a ten-fold jump in the circulation of the Messenger, and he also knew that the alleged affinity between genius and capital was a fabulous lie.

Chapter Four POE AND THE MASSES No individual considers himself as one of the mass. Each person, in his own estimate, is the pivot on which all the rest of the world spins round. (Poe, 1849 review of Lowell’s A Fable for Critics)

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HROUGHOUT HIS career, Poe struggled in open and subtle ways to elude the worst excesses of the “magazine prison house.” Initially, Poe imagined that he could slip his economic burdens by invoking the pure pleasure of art, but he soon realized that it was necessary to please the Capital Reader first in order to survive as a commercial writer. Confronted by this living embodiment of capital, Poe staked his hopes on technological advances and especially on magazine ventures. As demonstrated in the previous chapter, the entrepreneurial Poe was no more successful (nor more authentic) than the romantic visionary, but the magazine campaigns nevertheless reveal Poe’s willingness to carry his struggle into new fields and practices. Poe’s criticism is especially important in this regard, for here the general economic predicament, having penetrated literature and attained symbolic form, was finally confronted on the more familiar terrain of writing itself. Even a cursory glance at Poe’s criticism betrays a preoccupation with the uses of texts, a preoccupation motivated primarily by a dramatic increase in production and a corresponding crisis in literary value. This crisis obliged him to reconsider the ramifications of purveying pleasure to the mass audience. As shall become clear, Poe’s persistent struggle to influence the taste of the reading public was not so much a reactionary attempt to resurrect old aesthetic standards but rather an effort to institute a new order of criticism that would enable the evaluation and sorting of a new supply of literary commodities. This helps to explain why his theories of literary value frequently focus on the details of literary consumption, including the experience of novelty, the effect at which literature should aim, the proper length of the reading session, and ways to speed up the rate of reading. Throughout all of his critical writings, however, there is a barely repressed enmity toward the reading public, an enmity closely linked to his struggles with capital and the Capital Reader. In this chapter I accordingly take a closer look at working conditions in the industry of letters, for these working conditions contain the secret behind Poe’s uneasy relation to the literate masses.

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I. THE INFORMATION METROPOLIS In nineteenth-century America, literature was fast becoming a distinctly urban commodity, and those who produced it came into contact with all aspects of city life, ranging from the dizzying pace of commerce to the social ills of poverty, crime, and overcrowding. In addition, American cities accelerated the transformation of information into an economic good. Alarmed at the growing dependency of the country on urban news, one editor lamented the power of cities to lure away people “in pursuit of business, pleasure, or information.”1 Unlike earlier European cities, whose urban geography acknowledged church and state power, the very design of North American cities reflected the predominance of trade and manufacturing. With few common areas to break the monotony of rectangular grids, city streets seemed little more than “conduits for commodities and information.”2 Poe was an especially keen observer of the information metropolis. In addition to his childhood sojourn in London, he worked as a commercial writer in virtually every major U.S. publishing center, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. These experiences taught him not only the rigors of literary labor but also the crucial role of the publishing industry in national economic development. Surveys of the relative magnitude of the various economic sectors indicate that during the 1830s, employment in informationrelated trades and industries grew at a more rapid pace than employment in any other sector between 1800 and the present.3 In some cities, moreover, the information sector produced more wealth than shipyards and iron foundries. This can be ascertained by comparing the value added by the publishing industry with the value added by other industries. Though it is difficult to obtain reliable figures for antebellum cities, one largely complete set of data does exist for Boston’s 1832 publishing industry (the figures encompass lithography, engraving, type founding, stereo-typing, bookbinding, printing, and other trades related to the production of newspapers, books, pamphlets and miscellaneous documents). According to these figures, the value added by the publishing industry exceeded that of any other class of manufacturing. 4 Boston, however, was far less important as a national publishing center than either New York or Philadelphia.5 After leaving the Southern Literary Messenger, Poe accordingly moved to New York, then to Philadelphia, and then back to New York again. This itinerary was justified by both conventional wisdom and economic data. The 1840 U.S. Census, for example, showed that New York had nearly 2,000 workers employed in printing and publishing, making it the city’s “single most important industry.”6 Significantly, many of the products of this industry identified themselves as instruments or catalysts of further economic development. The stunning

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growth in newspaper publishing and mass literacy in antebellum American has often been noted, but there are comparatively few studies of the link between information and the general transformation of the U.S. economy. Aside from providing detailed reports on prices, transportation, and other market conditions, antebellum newspapers played a vital role in advertising, typically devoting most of the front page to paid commercial and trade announcements.7 With names like Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine, The New York Gazette and General Advertiser, The Mercantile Advertiser, and the Dollar Newspaper, these publications emphasized “the relationship between the printing industries and the primary mercantile functions of the city” (Pred, Spatial Dynamics, 174). At a deeper level, however, the publishing industry foreshadowed a new economic order, one in which information would be appropriated, produced, and circulated for the benefit or valorization of capital. Today, there is an increasing tendency among social scientists to trace the so-called “Information Society” to its roots in an earlier period of capitalist development. Kevin Robins and Frank Webster, for example, rightly point out that one of F. W. Taylor’s principles of “scientific management” involved the appropriation of “the great mass of traditional knowledge” stored in “the heads of the workmen.”8 But even before Taylor promulgated these principles at the turn of the century, manufacturers understood the importance of reducing reliance on skilled workers by systematically capturing their knowledge and skill. In trying to win a government musket contract, for example, Eli Whitney claimed in 1812 that American machines could substitute for skilled (British) artisans: This [musket factory] was commenced and has been carried on upon a plan which is unknown in Europe, and the great leading object of which is to substitute correct and effective operations of machinery for that skill of the artist which is not possessed in this country to any considerable extent.9

Not surprisingly, Poe seized upon the machine as a figure for the degradation of writing in the nineteenth century. As we have seen, “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob” satirizes a method of cutting and pasting together passages from various texts as a shortcut to painstaking original composition. Poe was also familiar with nineteenth-century attempts to mechanize the intellectual occupations of human beings. Charles Babbage had invented a primitive computer called the “Difference Engine” in the 1820s, and as demonstrated in Chapter Nine, Poe was much more familiar with Babbage’s works than hitherto suspected. Not surprisingly, Poe wondered what such inventions augured for commercial writers in particular and the publishing industry in general. Upon learning of Faber’s speaking automaton in 1846, for example, Poe wryly remarked that “There remains only one achievement—a machine to

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think. We should say, perhaps, there has remained; for certain books lately printed induce us to believe that some people think by machine.”10 Poe here touches on the darker side of industrialization, on the far-reaching social consequences of replacing labor-assisting tools with machine systems that captured or appropriated the technical knowledge of skilled workers. Aside from rendering these workers obsolete, such changes ultimately reorganized traditional productive activity into forms of labor posited by and corresponding to the peculiar needs of capitalist development itself.11 Much of this story can be found in histories of the American working class, especially those histories which cover the division between intellectual and manual labor and the “de-skilling” of manual labor by technological development. In general, such histories focus on artisanal and industrial labor in the later half of the nineteenth century rather than on any changes in the nature of intellectual work before the Civil War. As suggested above, however, the uneven development of the information sector made it in many ways more advanced than other machine-aided manufactures. Economic and technological developments created great instability within the publishing industry, and among commercial magazinists like Poe, this instability was alternately perceived as a thrilling opportunity or as a menacing chaos. Focusing too intently on literary texts, one can easily overlook these broad changes in the conditions of intellectual labor. It is also easy to overlook the infrastructural changes that preceded and enabled the more sensational emergence of the penny press and mass culture in general. New York, for example, emerged as a major publishing center partly because it had already become a major commercial city, and this earlier economic achievement was in turn predicated upon superior access to the world market—access that provided the city with the most current information from England and Europe. According to one 1830 newspaper, city residents “take it for granted that there is no other place in the country where the business of collecting ship-news is carried on with so much energy and industry as in the port of New York.”12 As Poe suggested fifteen years later, the city most efficient at collecting commercial information was also the most adept at disseminating literary commodities: During a recent visit to Boston, we were agreeably surprised at the number of intrinsically valuable works on the counters of “the trade.” Why is it that so few of them are generally circulated in New York? A more liberal interchange of literary commodities would certainly prove beneficial to the two communities. . . . The evil would in part be remedied, if New York were regarded as it should be, as the London of America—and if all literary enterprises were here carried into effect. The facilities for distributing works, are far greater than any other of our cities can boast—and as a centre of opinion, it is the metropolis of the country.13

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Once again it is important to note Poe’s use of the language of commerce. Books are “literary commodities,” writing is a “literary enterprise,” and New York is a fitting metropolis because it is uniquely equipped to distribute both ideas and material goods. Poe slipped so easily between literature and commerce in part because he was a journalist in the city which, more than any other, emphasized the commercial value of the news. At a time when the national economy was developing at an uneven rate, and when the Atlantic economy was first positing capitalism as a world system, commercial enterprises were utterly dependent on ships carrying “general news for the press; special information affecting the price of cotton or flour; regular mails; and official dispatches” (Albion, SquareRiggers on Schedule, 174). This suggests that the later explosion in the transportation and communications infrastructure was not simply the result of technological discoveries. Before transatlantic steamship service became possible in 1838, the rapid conveyance of information was already being achieved by packet ships; before the telegraph, semaphore relays and signal poles were already being used to speed the dissemination of information newly arrived from England or the Continent. In other words, an urgent demand for commercial news antedated many developments in communications technology and infrastructure. For the individual capitalist, thrust into competition not only with neighboring merchants and manufacturers but also with the entire world, nothing had more value than new information. In antebellum America, then, the development of a mass culture was preceded by the emergence of information as a means of production in its own right. Poe saw manifestations of this emergence in his foster-father’s quest for commercial information about prices, products, shipping schedules, and market trends. When Poe later reflected on the culture of the magazine age, he accordingly revealed an astute understanding of the role played by information in commerce and capitalist development. Poe’s experience of economic history is important, in part because it challenges insular or self-referential models of literary change. It has often been suggested, for example, that modernist literature defined itself against the lowbrow or “pulp” productions of a twentieth-century publishing industry. In Poe’s day, however, higher literature defined itself not only against the entertaining effusions of the penny press, but also against those productive texts designed to promote commerce and economic growth. By a sort of chronological necessity, Poe worked to free his writing from the burden of commercial utility before he fully understood the pitfalls of the literary marketplace. In light of this chronology and the changes wrought by the Panic of 1837, it is no surprise that Poe modified or reversed his early attitudes toward the mass audience. Poe’s initial embrace of the mass audience is reflected in “The Folio Club,” a prefatory sketch to a planned but never published collection of tales. Nar-

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rated by a disgruntled new inductee, the 1833 sketch satirizes an imaginary organization somewhat similar to Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia Junto. According to the narrator, the Folio Club had originally been established for “the instruction of society, and the amusement of themselves,” but in the present time of the sketch, the utilitarian or productive goal has been completely forgotten. At monthly meetings of the Club, members present a “Short Prose Tale” for evaluation, and the composer of the worst tale is charged with the task of providing wine and dinner for the next gathering. Corrupt or biased evaluation leads to much disaffection, and the club must constantly recruit new members (or new dupes) to guarantee a steady supply of food and drink for the older members. Suspecting as much, the narrator rejects the literary verdict of the club and appeals to the larger jury of anonymous mass readers (the anticipated purchasers of Poe’s book). This turn from the exclusive club to the mass audience is merely implied in the sketch itself, but in an 1836 letter to a Philadelphia printer named Harrison Hall, Poe clarifies the premise: “The author of the tale adjudged to be the worst demurs from the general judgment, seizes the seventeen M.SS. upon the table, and, rushing from the house, determines to appeal, by printing the whole, from the decision of the Club, to that of the public” (Letters, 1:104). The appeal to popular judgment is a recurrent theme in Poe’s writings, and in general such appeals are accompanied by a (purportedly) new aesthetics based on pleasure rather than utility. In his 1831 “Letter to Mr. —— ——,” for example, Poe declares that “a poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth” (PT, 17). This passage was lifted almost verbatim from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, but as with Poe’s other borrowings, it is important to recognize what attracted him to such pronouncements in the first place.14 Raymond Williams has documented how British romanticism emerged in response to the dramatic social and economic changes wrought by capitalist development. Following Williams’s reasoning, Poe’s adaptation of Coleridge and other romantics may perhaps constitute a response to similar changes in the United States. But Poe would not have needed the British romantics to apprehend the impact of capitalist development on cultural production. George Tucker, who taught at the University of Virginia while Poe was a student there, offered a widely accepted view of the profession of authorship: But of all the intellectual labors, those of authors are, in general, the worst rewarded. Now and then, indeed, a popular writer receives a liberal remuneration; but, for one of this description, there are probably fifty failures, and perhaps twenty who do not receive for their efforts in this way the pay of a common laborer. . . . A small number of authors, having at once rare merit and good fortune, are very highly remunerated, for they are able to command monopoly prices. Those of average merit, who are best rewarded, are writers of approved school-books, voyages and

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travels, and, above all, works of fiction. Men pay more freely and liberally for pleasure than for instruction; and there are probably an hundred readers of an interesting romance for one of an eloquent sermon.15

Whether Poe was responding to this description or to the conditions that occasioned it, “The Folio Club” and the 1831 “Letter” show him taking his first steps toward a theory of literary value based on immediate gratification rather than moral instruction or productive utility. In his plan for “Tales of the Folio Club,” Poe even attempts to transform literary evaluation into a more popular genre by putting judgments into the mouths of specific characters, thereby creating “a burlesque upon criticism generally” (Letters, 1:104). This early emphasis on the pleasures of reading eventually developed into the poetics of effect described, most notably, in his reviews of Hawthorne and in “The Philosophy of Composition.” In these later writings, Poe often intersperses derogatory comments on the emerging mob of readers, but his criticism nevertheless registers, in countless ways, the growing divide between productive and nonproductive texts. As Poe recognized from the start of his career, the information metropolis was inexorably giving way to the city of mass consumption.

II. HISTORY OF A STYLE As demonstrated in previous chapters, Poe worked in an industry that was plagued by a crisis of surplus. This surplus—and the economic order that occasioned it—raised disturbing questions about the nature of art and artistic creation. At times, Poe feared that his creative freedom would be “ruined” by some industrial or linguistic variant of capital, while at other times he foresaw the annihilation of his artistic identity amidst the teeming literate masses.16 Poe accordingly realized that an aesthetics of consumption was no better than a poetics of productivity at freeing him from his economic predicament, especially his dependence on the taste of the mass audience. When he argued, for example, that a nineteenth-century version of speed-reading would ultimately become “the method of the mob” (ER, 1319), he effectively acknowledged that the mind of the mass reader, like meaning itself, would have to be streamlined or rationalized to facilitate further development in the literary market. Responding to such pressures, Poe refashioned an aesthetics formerly based on the highly personal experience of pleasure into a more uniform aesthetics founded upon the science of the single effect. Poe first broached the issue in a discussion of style, specifically the style of historical writing. In the February 1836 Southern Literary Messenger (where Lucian Minor’s “Selection in Reading” also appears), Poe reviewed Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s historical novel Rienzi: The Last of the Tribunes. According to

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Poe, Bulwer has written a better history than the historians due to his knack for breathing life into a mass of dead facts. “There is no greater error,” Poe claims, “than dignifying with the name of History a tissue of dates and details.” What matters to Poe is the effect of a text, and if a reader bears away no definite impression of the epoch, the historian has failed to convey history. Rienzi, however, does enable the reader to grasp the reality of fourteenth-century Rome, and this leads Poe to reconsider the relationship between fiction and truth: “We shall often discover in Fiction the essential spirit and vitality of Historic Truth—while Truth itself, in many a dull and lumbering Archive, shall be found guilty of all the inefficiency of Fiction” (ER, 145). As indicated by the economic terminology, Poe wants to demonstrate that certain fictional genres can convey historical reality more rapidly and efficiently than archival records. He wants to demonstrate, in other words, that fiction is sometimes faster than truth. When it comes to writing history rather than historical fiction, however, the “lumbering archive” functions as a raw material rather than an article of direct consumption, and Poe accordingly favors the style that can most effectively register a large mass of unrelated details. In the February 1839 American Museum, Poe discusses Gibbon’s “stately but artificial” prose and the purpose that underlies his peculiar grammatical constructions. Claiming to be the first critic to appreciate the quantitative basis of Gibbon’s style, Poe explains how Gibbon achieves an extreme density of factual information: The immense theme of the decline and fall required precisely the kind of sentence which he habitually employed. A world of essential, or at least of valuable, information or remark, had either to be omitted altogether, or collaterally introduced. In his endeavours thus to crowd in his vast stores of research, much of the artificial will, of course, be apparent; yet I cannot see that any other method would have answered as well. (ER, 1063)

As this demonstrates, Poe came to realize that historical texts provided a repository of stylistic techniques which commercial writers could use to solve their own (contemporary) problems. Hence it is no surprise that he singled out the “speed” of Bulwer’s style and the density of Gibbon’s, for speed and density were well suited to Poe’s own publishing environment. Significantly, in the very act of identifying styles that could survive the impending years of textual overproduction, Poe suggests a relation between literary technique and historical environment. That is, through his casual observations on the style of historical writing, Poe suggests that style itself is the product of history. With its emphasis on density and speed, Poe’s historical moment seemed to have little use for metaphysical depth. As indicated by the 1831 “Letter” cited above, Poe at the very outset of his career believed that the growing diffusion of information would be accompanied by an irreversible relocation of truth from the depths to the surfaces of culture, from “the huge abysses where

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wisdom is sought” to the “palpable places where she is found” (PT, 13). Later in his career, Poe accordingly castigated writers who, failing to heed the ascension of information, continued to propagate the myth of profound meaning. The evolution of Poe’s attitude toward profound meaning can be traced in his reviews of Bulwer. Because of the British novelist’s great popularity, Poe often used his reviews of Bulwer as occasions to comment on the general emergence of a mass culture and a mass audience. Thus in his laudatory 1836 review of Rienzi, Poe views the book as “direct evidence that a people is not a mob, nor a mob a people, nor a mob’s idol the idol of a people” (ER, 146). Poe later revised his opinion of Bulwer, but he continued to use the novelist as a pretext for discussing broader cultural changes. In his 1839 “Literary Small Talk,” for example, Poe denounces Bulwer for lacking “the true vigor of intellect which would prompt him to seek, and enable him to seize truth upon the surface of things.” The problem has less to do with art than efficiency, for as Poe goes on to complain, Bulwer “is perpetually refining to no purpose upon themes which have nothing to gain, and everything to lose in the process” (ER, 1062). In terms consistent with Poe’s other statements, Bulwer fails as a writer because his labor adds no value to the thinking material. But as indicated by the rest of the review, Poe sees an additional problem involving the effect of such writing on the impressionable masses. After criticizing Bulwer for spinning out “abominable” accounts of Egyptian theology, Poe suddenly remembers, “apropos to this subject,” a medieval crusade consisting of “some two hundred thousand of the most stupid, savage, drunken, and utterly worthless of the people” who chose a goat and a goose as their leaders: These were carried in front, and to these, for no reason whatever, save beyond the mad whim of the mob, was ascribed a miraculous participation in the spirit of the Deity. Had this rabble founded an empire, we should, no doubt, have had them instituting a solemn worship of goat and goose, and Mr. Bulwer, with care, might have discovered in the goat a type of one species of deep wisdom, and in the goose a clear symbol of another. (ER, 1062–63)

A little symbolism is a dangerous thing. Poe “remembers” the mad whim of the mob because Bulwer’s popularity always raised questions about the mass audience and the politics of meaning. Significantly, Poe often imagined the mass audience as a dangerous mob that was on the verge of rising up in revolt against cryptic or profound signifying practices. When a printer must substitute an “x” for a missing letter “o” in “X-ing a Paragrab,” for example, the local populace storms the print shop in the belief that “some diabolical treason lay concealed in the hieroglyphics.”17 In his 1839 remarks on Bulwer, however, it is Poe himself who fears the power of cryptic or profound messages, especially when such messages circulate amongst an unreasoning mob. Two years later, Poe again used a novel by Bulwer as an occasion to comment upon mass

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culture. In his 1841 review of Night and Morning, Poe contrasts the narrative pleasures “comprehended but by the few” with the grosser entertainments that “the public, great-gander as it is, is content to swallow” (ER, 151, 159). In the concluding sentence of the 1841 review, Poe calls further attention to this distinction: “[The novel’s] merits beyond doubt overbalance its defects, and if we have not dwelt upon the former with as much unction as upon the latter, it is because the Bulwerian beauties are precisely of that secondary character which never fails of the fullest public appreciation” (ER, 160). Poe’s changing attitude toward Bulwer was partly motivated by the new conditions attending the Panic of 1837, and these same conditions inspired him to supplement his previous aesthetics of pleasure with such utilitarian concepts as “truth.” The new use of truth is revealed most notably in Poe’s first major review of Hawthorne (May 1842). There, Poe draws a crucial distinction between Beauty, which is the highest aim of the poem, and Truth, which is the basis of the tale: Truth is often, and in very great degree, the aim of the tale. Some of the finest tales are tales of ratiocination. Thus the field of this species of composition, if not in so elevated a region on the mountain of the mind, is a table-land of far vaster extent than the domain of the mere poem. Its products are never so rich, but infinitely more numerous, and more appreciable by the mass of mankind. (ER, 573)

The generic difference between poetry and the tale here becomes a social distinction between high and mass culture. A similar distinction appears in his 1835 letter to White, where Poe suggests that tales should be evaluated by their effect on circulation rather than their intrinsic literary merit. In 1842, however, a more seasoned magazinist rescues literature from a purely quantitative measurement (its impact on circulation) in order to reclaim truth as a literary effect that can be successfully marketed to the mass audience. But why, in accordance with Poe’s earlier aesthetics, shouldn’t the magazinist just sell pleasure to the masses? The question uncovers a richly overdetermined resistance to mass pleasure, which lies at the heart of Poe’s predicament. This resistance is discussed at greater length in succeeding chapters, but here it is appropriate to mention some of Poe’s fundamental concerns. First, Poe had come to suspect that the prospective mass audience was already engaged in ways of signifying not determined by the commodity form or capitalist relations of exchange. (With characteristic prescience, Poe at one point suggested that the masses were always already entertained.18) Second, Poe found the interpretive responses of the mass audience dangerously mysterious, and he was therefore eager to purvey a kind of literature whose effect could be calculated with greater certainty. In his reviews of Bulwer and in such tales as “X-ing a Paragrab,” Poe reveals his anxiety over the fickle and sometimes violent interpretive responses of a mass audience. As demonstrated below, Poe

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was eager to control these responses through a more scientific approach to art, even if this involved demagoguery and manipulation. Poe’s final concern arose from his absolute dependence on mass circulation. He was looking for ways to give his work marketability—and material existence—without simply pandering to “the mad whim of the mob.” Poe never found a perfect solution, but he clearly recognized that to survive in an environment where reading time was scarce and where potential readers were already signifying, the mass cultural text had to promise something more than lofty, ephemeral delight. The expansion of the literary market, then, was only one aspect of the total transformation of the publishing environment, a transformation that made style as well as content the object of controversy and suspicion. Poe’s scattered remarks on mob literature reveal an anxiety over his economic reliance on the mass audience, with its dangerous and unpredictable interpretive practices. Because production and consumption were two moments of the same process, Poe could not simply ignore the literate masses. Despite his frequent recourse to cultural elitism, Poe’s fate as a commercial writer was inextricably bound to popular tastes, determined as always by the calculating judgments of a Capital Reader. This helps to explain the mixture of fascination and revulsion with which Poe viewed Bulwer and other successful authors of the period. But in his attack on profundity and his advocacy of the truth of surfaces, Poe displayed a deeper complicity with the emerging publishing industry. Pleasure may have been the appropriate aesthetic goal for elite readers, but for mass readers Poe envisioned something less intimate and capricious—a rational aesthetics based on predictable, controllable responses. Poe’s dream, expressed most famously in “The Philosophy of Composition,” was to develop a single style that could satisfy both “the popular and the critical taste” (ER, 15). The inner contradictions of this strategy are discussed in the next section, but by theorizing a dual or divided audience, Poe effectively acknowledged that the crisis of literary value could no longer be solved by a traditional poetics of beauty, truth, or even pleasure. Like the narrator of “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Poe found that the walls of his magazine prison-house were pressing relentlessly in.

III. THE MASSES Since many of Poe’s tales and articles were composed “to satisfy a particular demand” (Letters, 1:271), his work should not be read in complete in isolation from the literate masses, even though our understanding of the masses must remain somewhat shadowy and incomplete (very much like Poe’s). As indicated by most major histories of the United States, the rise of an industrial proletariat occurred in the later half of the nineteenth century. This does not

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mean, however, that the country lacked an urban working class during the years of Poe’s maturity. Studies by Herbert Gutman, Christine Stansell, Sean Wilentz, and others indicate that despite the continuing predominance of agriculture and artisanal labor, there was beyond question a working class that was expanding, literate, and politically active.19 But the way that Poe and other writers invoked the “mob” suggests that in antebellum America there were at least two masses, one slowly coalescing out of the process of capitalist development, the other conjured up overnight in response to the more immediate crises of the publishing industry. The masses, in other words, wore many different faces. When engaged in fits of invective, Poe issued sweeping denunciations of the “mob” without ever identifying its members. At other times, however, Poe discussed the mass audience with sociological precision: To the uneducated, to those who read little, to the obtuse in intellect (and these three classes constitute the mass) these [popular] books are not only acceptable, but are the only ones which can be called so. We here make two divisions—that of the men who can think but who dislike thinking; and that of the men who either have not been presented with the materials for thought, or who have no brains with which to “work up” the material. (ER, 177)

Significantly, although Poe sometimes portrayed the appreciation of beauty in delicate and exalted terms, in this passage he describes the reading of popular books as a kind of mechanical process. Some readers are “poor” due to laziness or infirmity, but others simply lack the raw materials or mental instruments necessary for the production of literary meaning. We have already seen Poe’s heavy reliance on the discourse of commerce; here Poe uses terms from industry and manufacturing to describe the reading habits of the masses. Although Poe’s biography should cast light on his complex relation to the mass audience, many fine critical studies tend to take Poe’s aristocratic pretensions at face value. But as we have seen, it would be a mistake to assume that Poe felt a deep solidarity with the ruling elite. John Allan’s business dealings put him into conflict with both Southern planters and Northern industrialists, and Poe’s estrangement from Allan made him dubious of merchants as well.20 Moreover, even if Poe had not been cast out from the Allan household, he would have understood the precarious nature of his class position. T. L. Preston, a schoolmate of Poe’s, recalled that during the 1820s, “Richmond was one of the most aristocratic cities on this side of the Atlantic.” According to Preston, it was normal for the boys at Joseph H. Clarke’s school to reflect “the odour of their fathers’ notions, good or bad. Of Edgar Poe it was known that his parents had been players, and that he was dependent upon the bounty that is bestowed upon an adopted son. All this had the effect of making the boys decline his leadership; and on looking back on it since, I fancy it gave

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him a fierceness he would otherwise not have had.”21 Preston’s recollection suggests the advisability of distinguishing between real and professed social status, especially in the case of an orphan child of itinerant actors, who enlisted in the army out of desperation and who lived in poverty for twelve of his fourteen years as a commercial magazinist.22 Poe’s aristocratic airs, like his claims to athletic prowess and vast erudition, bear all the marks of overcompensation, which may also inform his attitude toward the multitudes conjured up so incessantly by Jacksonian discourse. A tendency toward overcompensation can in fact be detected in many of Poe’s statements about himself. As a young soldier, for example, Poe insisted rather too vehemently that “I can walk among infection & be uncontaminated. . . . My father do not throw me aside as degraded” (Letters, 1:12). When he made it into West Point, however, this same soldier contradicted the invulnerability professed earlier by admitting that his cadet’s appointment was earned “by the most humiliating privations” (Letters, 1:41). Keenly aware of the difference between class and class identification, Poe in 1849 reconsidered the makeup of “the people”: . . . no individual considers himself as one of the mass. Each person, in his own estimate, is the pivot on which all the rest of the world spins round. We may abuse the people by wholesale, and yet with a clear conscience so far as regards any compunction for offending any one from among the multitude of which that “people” is composed. Every one of the crowd will cry “Encore!—give it to them, the vagabonds!—it serves them right.” (ER, 815)

Poe speaks in alluringly suggestive terms without ever confessing the possibility of his own membership in the masses. Nor are his frequent condemnations of the vaguely defined “mob” to be taken uncritically, especially since these are balanced by denunciations of editorial cliques, bookselling coteries, and the scribbling “gentlemen of elegant leisure” who, through greed or incompetence, cause severe distortions of the literary marketplace. Poe’s ambivalence toward the mass audience is clearly demonstrated in his critical writings, where he sometimes appears as an aristocratic snob and at other times as a public-spirited consumer crusader. In 1849, for example, a curmudgeonly Poe writes that “the nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led” (ER, 1455). On other occasions, Poe appeared to be more a civic-minded critic. Thus in an 1839 review of Longfellow, Poe complains that inferior works like Hyperion “are potent in unsettling the popular faith in Art—a faith which at no day more than the present, needs the support of men of letters.”23 And in an 1841 review of Guy Fawkes, he seems indignant at William Ainsworth’s exploitation of the common reader: The design of Mr. Ainsworth has been to fill, for a certain sum of money, a stipulated number of pages. There existed the necessity of engaging the readers whom especially

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he now addresses—that is to say the lowest order of the lettered mob—a necessity of enticing them into the commencement of a perusal. For this the title . . . was all sufficient. . . . As for fulfilling any reasonable expectations . . . as for exerting himself for the permanent or continuous amusement of the poor flies whom he had inveigled into his trap—all this, with him, has been a consideration of no moment. He had a task to perform, not a duty. (ER, 105)

Like a Yankee razor, Ainsworth’s product is inferior because it was “manufactured merely to sell” (ER, 105). In his criticism of drama, the trade of his natural parents, Poe seems to ally himself more closely with the audience. Attacking the conventionality of American theater, Poe warns that “the common sense even of the mob, can no longer be affronted, night after night, with impunity” (ER, 1398). In a more tender moment, Poe points out the unique qualities of collective viewing: “One half the pleasure experienced at a theater arises from the spectator’s sympathy with the rest of the audience, and especially, from his belief in their sympathy for him” (ER, 209). The complexity of Poe’s relation to the masses is registered most effectively in the concept of genius. Taking great pains to distinguish between artistic ability and social class, Poe somewhat disingenuously portrayed the genius as an impoverished outcast. In an 1845 review of Longfellow, Poe describes how the plagiarist “pilfers from some poverty-stricken, and therefore neglected man of genius, on the reasonable supposition that . . . he will be too busy keeping the wolf from his door to look after the purloiners of his property.” Who would perpetrate such a crime? Having learned a thing or two from the campaign speeches of Andrew Jackson, Poe characterizes the culprit as “the wealthy and triumphant gentleman of elegant leisure” (ER, 720). But although the gentleman and the genius contend over literary property, they both keep their distance from the literate masses. In a discussion of the pitfalls of popular fiction, for example, Poe asserts that a writer such as Dickens does “grievous wrong to his own genius—in appealing to the popular judgment at all” (ER, 313). According to Poe, popular writing should be left to humbler talents such as Nathaniel P. Willis, who “is well constituted for dazzling the masses—with brilliant, agreeable talents—no profundity—no genius.”24 Supposing that the converse is also true, genius would appear to be a positive hindrance to salability. For a commercial magazinist, however, salability is the sine qua non of literary survival. Since Poe’s entire career shows a deep concern for the trends of the literary market, and since his most intimate letters reveal a fervent desire for fame and wide circulation, Poe’s theory of the alienated genius25 starkly contradicts his daily practice of composing tales and articles expressly for the masses. Pushing the concept of alienated genius to its limit uncovers yet another contradiction in Poe’s criticism. Though David Reynolds and others have interpreted the diversity of antebellum texts as indicating the power of a subversive imagination, it must be remembered that to

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an increasing extent, novelty was merely the effect of literary overproduction. In a publishing environment characterized less by subversion than by sheer difference, it was difficult to envision alternatives to the dominant order. It was equally difficult to ascertain which texts and which writers possessed true genius. After having read “all that has been written” about religion and the soul, Poe despairingly concluded that “the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment” (ER, 1429). In his “Marginalia” for the 1849 Southern Literary Messenger, Poe suggests that the person of genius must suffer a similar fate: . . . any individual gifted, or rather accursed, with an intellect very far superior to that of his race . . . would make himself enemies at all points. And since his opinions and speculations would widely differ from those of all mankind—that he would be considered a madman, is evident. . . . This subject is a painful one indeed. That individuals have so soared above the plane of their race, is scarcely to be questioned; but, in looking back through history for traces of their existence, we should pass over all biographies of “the good and the great,” while we search carefully the slight records of wretches who died in prison, in Bedlam, or upon the gallows. (ER, 1459–60)

The autobiographical tone of this is unmistakable, coming as it does after poverty, illness, attacks on his character in the press, and an infamous libel suit. Whatever the value of genius in ideal realms, in social practice it seemed to have no value at all. At the end of his life, in other words, Poe feared that the very quality which should have elevated him above the mass would instead invite his annihilation. Popularity and merit therefore appeared to be irreconcilable, but there were three notable writers who challenged the rule: Hawthorne, Dickens, and Poe himself. Not surprisingly, Poe discovered that there could be a connection between quality and salability after the success of “The Gold Bug” and especially “The Raven.” In an unsigned review of himself, Poe notes that the author “evidently” intended a tale like “The Gold Bug” to achieve popularity because it “made a great noise when first issued, and was circulated to greater extent than any American tale, before or since” (ER, 869). Perhaps due to the lofty position of poetry on “the mountain of the mind,” he was more reticent about the dual critical and popular success enjoyed by “The Raven.” Accordingly, the most important point in “The Philosophy of Composition” is barely made at all: Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem per se, the circumstance, or say the necessity—which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste. (ER, 15)

Referring to Poe’s designation of “a” poem, William Charvat asks if there is “significance in the italic.”26 Based upon what has been suggested thus far, the significance could not be greater. Poe did not aim at composing different texts

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for different segments of the reading audience, for this would have either limited his best works to the smallest circulation, or excluded them from publication altogether and thereby condemned them to oblivion. Instead, he viewed his texts as split or divided objects—one part containing literary value for the critical taste, the other part containing such matter as would render them profitable in the mass market. Importantly, Poe grasped this latter, material requirement at the very start of his career; as he told Thomas W. White in 1835, “To be appreciated you must be read” (Letters, 1:58). Dickens, of course, was as widely read as anyone, and for this reason Poe touted him as a writer uniquely suited to the new literary market, that is, as a writer capable of satisfying both the critical and the popular taste. Poe’s second (and longer) review of Barnaby Rudge begins with a tirade against other reviewers—Poe calls them “small geniuses” or “literary Titmice”—who discount this double requirement and who judge a work solely by its popularity. Deriding all principles and theories of criticism, these reviewers put their faith in the market and accept sales figures as the true measure of a book’s merit.27 If Poe had been discussing another writer, he might have simply repeated his argument that popularity and quality are mutually exclusive. The example of Dickens, however, inspired Poe to pursue a different strategy of refutation. Claiming that theory and practice must be “one,” Poe begins by attributing to the “titmice” a proposition which he himself often maintained: Our present design is but to speak, at some length, of a book which in so much concerns the Titmice, that it affords them the very kind of demonstration which they chiefly affect—practical demonstration—of the fallacy of one of their favorite dogmas; we mean the dogma that no work of fiction can fully suit, at the same time, the critical and the popular taste. (ER, 226)

After this final phrase, which would resurface four years later in “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe contends that there is, after all, some compatibility between the powers of genius and the laws of the market: [T]he vast popularity of Barnaby Rudge must be regarded less as the measure of its value, than as the legitimate and inevitable result of certain well-understood critical propositions reduced by genius into practice. (ER, 226).

Poe is not entirely successful at showing how Dickens actually implements “critical propositions” in Barnaby Rudge; nor does Poe devote much attention to the precise features that made the novel a commercial success. Instead, Poe follows his traditional practice of identifying, from the perspective of the critical taste, the faults and virtues of Dickens’s text—faults and virtues which seem to have little bearing on Dickens’s popularity. In fact, Poe’s comments on Barnaby Rudge highlight the difficulties of satisfying both the popular and the critical taste with a single text. According to Poe, Dickens’s chief design is “to perplex the reader,” especially the “not-too-

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acute-reader,” by maintaining a certain air of mystery. But Poe later contends that it is the acute reader who most appreciates this design. In his first review of the novel, for example, Poe claims that “almost every word spoken by [Barnaby Rudge] will be found to have an under current of meaning, by paying strict attention to which the enjoyment of the imaginative reader will be infinitely heightened” (ER, 222). Poe even laments that it is “difficult to impress upon the mind of a merely general reader how vast a degree of interest may be given to the story by such means; for in truth that interest, great as it may be made, will not be, strictly speaking, of a popular cast” (ER, 221). Poe reiterates this point in his last review of Barnaby Rudge. Supposing that the “not-too-acute reader” would learn something from the first perusal, Poe recommends a second reading: Let [the reader] re-peruse “Barnaby Rudge,” and with a pre-comprehension of the mystery, these points of which we speak break out in all directions like stars, and throw quadruple brilliance over the narrative—a brilliance which a correct taste will at once declare unprofitably sacrificed at the shrine of the keenest interest of mere mystery.

Poe, it should be recalled, correctly guessed the identity of the murderer while the novel was still in serial publication, so in effect he possessed “pre-comprehension of the mystery” upon his first reading. But in focusing so intently on the pleasures for the acute or imaginative reader, Poe fails to demonstrate his original proposition that the success of Barnaby Rudge can be attributed to the ability of genius to reduce critical principles to literary practice. Without exception, all of the virtues Poe identifies are suited to the critical rather than the popular taste. In addition, Poe closes his last review by chastising Dickens for being “smitten with a desire for a novel path,” a desire which led him to squander his genius on mystery: Our Chief objection has not, perhaps, been so distinctly stated as we could wish. That this fiction, or indeed that any fiction written by Mr. Dickens, should be based in the excitement and maintenance of curiosity we look upon as a misconception, on the part of the writer, of his own very great yet very peculiar powers. . . . He has a talent for all things, but no positive genius for adaptation, and still less for that metaphysical art in which the souls of all mysteries lie. (ER, 243–44)

This objection is especially curious in light of Poe’s statement about the commercial success of his own mysteries, namely that the “tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key” (Letters, 2:328). Barnaby Rudge had presumably achieved popularity because of its mystery, but Poe explains neither how mystery appeals to the popular taste, nor how popularity results from the practical application of genius. Poe’s remarks on the narrative structure of Barnaby Rudge betray a similar disjunction between the critical and the popular taste. Plot, according to Poe,

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is “that from which no component atom can be removed . . . without ruin to the whole” (ER, 1293). In “The Philosophy of Composition” and elsewhere, Poe refines his notion of plot unity when he stresses “the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression” (ER, 15). This theory of a unified or single effect is related to the Aristotelian unities, but Poe shifts the emphasis from the text itself to the reader’s perception or impression of the text. Curiously, however, Poe implies that this effect or impression does not occur in common readers. In his earliest review of Dickens, for example, Poe describes unity of effect as “a quality not easily appreciated or indeed comprehended by an ordinary mind” (ER, 205). In the 1841 review of Bulwer cited above, Poe reaffirms this position: The interest of plot, referring, as it does, to cultivated thought in the reader, and appealing to considerations analogous with those which are the essence of sculptural taste, is by no means a popular interest; although it has the peculiarity of being appreciated in its atoms by all, while in its totality of beauty it is comprehended but by the few. (ER, 151)

Despite—or perhaps because of—this peculiarity, Dickens and other novelists seem scarcely concerned with achieving a unity of effect. In Barnaby Rudge, for example, the murder of Haredale should be the “soul” of the plot, but according to Poe this event is lost “in the multitudinous outrage and horror of the Rebellion” (ER, 239). In apparent exasperation, Poe finally characterizes Dickens as a brilliant and inventive writer who is nevertheless “totally deficient in constructiveness” (ER, 1294). Thus Dickens in particular and novels in general—the popular writer and the popular form—expose a fundamental contradiction in Poe’s literary theory, for although he measures literary value by unity of effect, he also concedes that no such effect is felt by the literate masses.28 Poe, in other words, failed to resolve the conflict between genius and mere popularity. In the March 1842 issue of Graham’s, one month after his final article on Barnaby Rudge had appeared, Poe accordingly reconsidered the relation between literary and market value. His occasion for doing so was a review of the best-selling novel Charles O’Malley—The Irish Dragoon by Charles James Lever. Poe begins by noting that the most salient point about the novel is its “great popularity,” a popularity surpassing “even the inimitable compositions of Mr. Dickens” (ER, 311). Then, after much disparagement of the opinions of the periodical press, Poe espouses the very position he had attributed to “titmice,” namely the position that literary value and popularity are mutually exclusive: The popularity of a book . . . is evidence of the book’s demerit, inasmuch as it shows a “stooping to conquer”—inasmuch as it shows that the author has dealt largely, if not altogether, in matters which are susceptible of appreciation by the mass of

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mankind—by uneducated thought, by uncultivated taste, by unrefined and unguided passion. (ER, 312)

Immediately after taking this extreme stance, however, Poe uses italics to add a crucial qualification: So long as the world retains its present point of civilization, so long will it be almost an axiom that no extensively popular book, in the right application of the term, can be a work of high merit, as regards those particulars of the work which are popular.

At the outset of his Barnaby Rudge review, Poe had argued that it was possible for a single work of fiction to suit “at the same time, the critical and the popular taste” (ER, 226). In the review of Lever’s Charles O’Malley, Poe diverges significantly from his earlier position, thereby emphasizing his continuing inability to resolve the conflict between literary merit and salability. Recognizing the deficiencies of his Dickens review,29 Poe takes another stab at the problem: A book may be readily sold, may be universally read, for the sake of some half or two-thirds of its matter, which half or two-thirds may be susceptible of popular appreciation, while the one-half or one-third remaining may be the delight of the highest intellect and genius, and absolute caviare to the rabble. (ER, 312)

Because of this, Poe continues, “the writer of fiction, who looks most sagaciously to his own interest, [will] combine all votes by intermingling with his loftier efforts such amount of less ethereal matter as will give general currency to his composition” (ER, 312). The question remains, however, whether the “less ethereal matter” has any value for the critical reader. Poe’s answer is striking, not so much for what it discloses about literature in antebellum America, but rather for what it reveals about his own dark attitudes toward the emerging mass culture. Commencing with a conventional argument about the broad appeal of simple imitation, Poe quotes English painter “H. L. Howard” (Charles J. Wells): The pleasure which results from [imitation], even when employed upon the most ordinary materials, will always render that property of the art the most attractive with the majority, because it may be enjoyed with the least mental exertion . . . For this reason the judicious artist, even in his loftiest efforts, will endeavor to introduce some of those qualities which are interesting to all, as a passport for those of a more intellectual character. (ER, 313)

This appears to solve the problem of universal appeal, but it should be recalled that in his two reviews of Barnaby Rudge, Poe had failed to identify any literary qualities which were “interesting to all.” For this reason Poe pauses to praise Dickens’s depictions of “what is called still-life” as well as his representations of “character in humble condition.” In the end, however, Poe retreats from

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universality, and with characteristic perversity he specifies a final quality which reopens the gap between the popular and the critical taste: It may be added, however, that the skill with which the author addresses the lower taste of the populace, is often a source of pleasure, because of admiration, to a taste higher and more refined, and may be made a point of comment and of commendation by the critic. (ER, 313)

Tacitly dissenting from Howard’s notion of universal appeal, Poe maintains his theory of the divided text: the masses enjoy Dickens for his powers of imitation and observation, but “informed and intellectual” readers tend to appreciate “higher qualities.” And even when these elite readers do sample Dickens’s popular wares, they do not enjoy them in the common way; instead, they aloofly admire “the ingenuity evinced in addressing the general taste” (ER, 313). Given the general direction of these comments, it is no surprise that Poe should conclude his digression on Dickens with a tirade against popularity. According to Poe, talented writers squander their genius “in appealing to the popular judgment at all.” Such appeals to the masses can only be excused as a matter of “pecuniary policy,” and therefore writers of genius should devote themselves more or less faithfully to the critical taste—except when economic necessity intrudes. Echoing the exalted language of his 1836 review of Conti the Discarded, Poe proclaims that “the holy—the electric spark of genius is the medium of intercourse between the noble and more noble mind. For lesser purposes there are humbler agents” (ER, 314). At every turn, then, Poe did more to accentuate than to resolve the original conflict between literary and market value. This, however, should not be viewed as an avoidable error in Poe’s criticism, because the conflict had less to do with aesthetic inconsistency than with real social differences. In other words, the theory of a unified effect ultimately involved all manner of social and economic conditions, and with a perverse insistency Poe repeatedly exposed the contradictions between these material conditions and his own poetics. First, the theory of a unified effect was challenged by Poe’s descriptions of a divided or deeply stratified audience. From the start of his career, Poe understood the primacy of the Capital Reader, whose judgment was guided by “anticipations of profit or loss, rather than any intrinsic merit of a work.”30 This in turn necessitated a certain reliance on mass sales, for without prospects of salability a text would never attain physical existence. Thus, even before Poe formulated his theory of a unified aesthetic effect, he had suggested that “the effect [of a tale] will be estimated better by the circulation of the Magazine than by any comments upon its contents.”31 As we have seen, Poe nevertheless took pains to distinguish between the mass of readers who made a text popular and the small group of critical readers who appreciated true literary merit. On rare occasions, he hoped that the gap between the popular and the critical

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taste might be progressively diminished, but in general Poe assumed a great and permanent division among readers, as if the permanence of this division might somehow protect him from being sullied or engulfed by the literate masses. The second and related challenge to unity of effect concerns the rise of the novel. As noted already, Poe viewed unity of effect as “a quality not easily appreciated or indeed comprehended by an ordinary mind” (ER, 205). In the reviews of Hawthorne discussed below, Poe emphasizes that unity requires a literary work to be perusable in “one sitting,” and quite obviously this is “an end unattainable by the novel.” In a sense, then, the theory of a unified effect betrays Poe’s blindness to the ascendance of the novel. But this blindness can be ascribed, in part, to Poe’s esteem for the physical form and commercial potential of the magazine. As illustrated in Chapter Three, Poe viewed the monthly magazine as a publishing venture which could avoid the flaws of stolid, unremunerative quarterlies on the one hand, and lucrative yet degraded newspapers on the other. Poe hoped that by attaining material control over his own magazine, he could achieve both economic and creative independence. In many ways, then, the commodity best able to satisfy the critical and the popular taste was not a poem or a novel, but a magazine. A final and more speculative problem with Poe’s theory of a unified effect concerns the rise of symbolism in American literature. Aside from passing remarks on Bulwer’s false profundity, Poe does not disparage “suggestiveness” per se; rather, he objects to allegorical narratives which seem to be mere vehicles for some “under-current” of meaning—especially an undercurrent of transcendental or mystical ideas.32 Poe’s most famous denunciation of allegory appears in his 1847 review of Hawthorne, but prior to this he had made his objections clear on many occasions. In his 1843 review of Robert Tyler’s “Death; or Medorus’ Dream,” for example, Poe outlines his basic position: These allegorical subjects are faulty in themselves, and it is high time they were discarded. The best allegory is a silly conceit, so far as the allegory itself is concerned, and is only tolerable when so subjected to an upper current of obvious or natural meaning, that the moral may be dispensed with at pleasure—the poem being still good, per se, when the moral, or allegory, is neglected. When this latter is made to form an under-current, that is to say when an occasionally suggested meaning arises from the obvious one—then, and then only, will a true taste endure the allegorical. It can never properly be made the main thesis.33

In an 1845 review of Henry B. Hirst, Poe similarly observes that one of Hirst’s poems is “a very effective allegorical poem—but all allegories are contemptible:—at least the only two which are not contemptible (The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Fairy Queen) are admired in despite of themselves (as allegories) and in the direct ratio of the possibility of keeping the allegorical meaning out of sight” (ER, 600).

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Poe seems most disturbed by the political capacity of allegory to conceal “true” meaning from outsiders, a capacity which in fact encouraged the historical emergence of the form. In his review of Orion by the English poet R. H. Horne, for example, Poe objects to “the personal and political allusions” which have “no business in a poem” (302). He objects, more generally, to Horne’s vacillating attempt to enforce “certain dogmas or doctrines” in a literary form ill-suited to didacticism: We may generalize . . . by calling it a homily against supineness or apathy in the cause of human PROGRESS, and in favor of energetic action for the good of the race. This is precisely the IDEA of the present school of canters. How feebly the case is made out in the poem—how insufficient has been all Mr. Horne’s poetical rhetoric in convincing even himself—may be gleaned form the unusual bombast, rigmarole, and mystification. (ER, 295)

Since he admires Horne’s talents, Poe is loathe to place too much blame on the poet himself. He therefore insinuates that Horne has fallen under the sway of a cult, which has “infected” him with mystical dogma: In a word, he has weakly yielded his own poetic sentiment of the poetic—yielded it, in some degree, to the pertinacious opinion, and talk, of a certain junto by which he is surrounded—a junto of dreamers . . . (ER, 292)

Who are these dreamers? Extrapolating somewhat liberally from the American scene, Poe identifies them as “the muddle-pates who dishonor a profound and ennobling philosophy by styling themselves transcendentalists.” Poe’s disdain of transcendentalism has often been noted, but in this context it would seem that his disdain has less to do with transcendentalism itself than with the danger of being excluded from some crucial undercurrent of meaning. In other words, a powerful intellectual junto could enforce its own distinctions of taste and doctrine, thereby transforming Poe himself into the equivalent of a “not-too-acute” or “merely general reader.” Poe’s keen apprehension of this danger is manifested by his varied attacks on the cliques and coteries that he saw hanging “like nightmares upon American literature” (ER, 1025). On several occasions, Poe sought to thwart the encroachment of such coteries by appealing to a natural aristocracy of readers. In his review of Horne’s Orion, for example, Poe asserts that “Readers do exist . . . and always will exist, who, to hearts of maddening fervor, unite, in perfection, the sentiment of the beautiful.” Using artistic taste to drive out political ideology, Poe claims that such readers possess a sense of the beautiful which is “the basis of all Fourier’s dreams.” “To readers such as these,” Poe concludes, “and only to such as these, must be left the decision of what the true Poesy is” (ER, 293). Poe was as likely, however, to call upon the mass of common readers in his struggle against interpretive juntos and their invidious allegories. The premise for “Tales of the Folio Club” involves just such an appeal to the

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public, and in the review of Orion, Poe makes a similar appeal by denouncing the “Orphicist” for failing to “speak to the people in that people’s ordinary tongue” (ER, 291). In his attacks on allegory, in other words, Poe followed a contradictory strategy which appealed at times to the elitism of elite readers and at other times to the commonness of common readers. Poe duplicates this contradictory strategy in his own fictional writings. On the one hand, Poe’s fiction seems fraught with symbolic undercurrents, even though he cautions against such undercurrents in his criticism. To some extent, of course, these undercurrents reflect the predicament of all mass circulation texts, which necessarily produce multiple and conflicting interpretations because they circulate among multiple and conflicting classes of readers. Building upon Poe’s insights, one might even construct a more material account of the origin of literary symbolism in America. Such an account would note the close correspondence between the emergence of symbolism and the rise of a segmented or divided mass audience. The account would also note that some writers—Poe included—seem to employ symbolism in a decidedly aggressive manner. This aggressiveness was in part a rejection of the “degraded” taste of the common reader, but it also reflected Poe’s disgust with the publishers who pandered to this taste. In 1836, for example, the Brothers Harper had refused to publish Poe’s tales because they “would be understood and relished only by a very few—not by the multitude.” Through an intermediary, they urged Poe to “lower himself a little to the ordinary comprehension of the generality of readers.”34 Poe undoubtedly received similar advice from such magazine proprietors as Thomas White, William Burton, and George Graham, but this did not make the advice any easier to accept. As Poe told one correspondent, “I have not only laboured solely for the benefit of others (receiving for myself a miserable pittance) but have been forced to model my thoughts at the will of men whose imbecility was evident to all but themselves” (Letters, 1:154). The surplus meaning or “suggestiveness” associated with symbolism may therefore be seen as a subversion—however petty and ineffectual—of the Capital Reader’s insistence that he “lower himself” to the intellectual level of the masses. On the other hand, however, Poe is also notable for his repudiation of profundity and depth, especially when such “depth” pertains to the proprietary ideas of some exclusive intellectual coterie. The best illustration of Poe’s repudiation or reversal of elite symbolism appears in “The Cask of Amontillado,” as Montresor lures the drunken Fortunato onward through the catacombs toward the site of his living entombment. Midway along this lurid journey, Fortunato makes a “grotesque” sign with his hands, testing whether Montresor belongs to the secret brotherhood of Freemasons. Montresor, as it turns out, is a mason of a different kind: “You do not comprehend?” he said. “Not I,” I replied.

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“Then you are not of the brotherhood.” “How?” “You are not of the masons.” “Yes, yes,” I said, “yes, yes.” “You? Impossible! A mason?” “A mason,” I replied. “A sign,” he said. “It is this,” I answered, producing a trowel from beneath the folds of my roquelaire. “You jest,” he exclaimed, recoiling a few paces. “But let us proceed to the Amontillado.” (ER, 851)

Some background information should help to clarify the importance of the scene. First, the Freemasons themselves accepted the distinction between speculative Freemasons—members of the brotherhood—and operative masons who actually practiced the craft (speculative Masons in fact traced their lineage to the operative masons who built the medieval cathedrals and even the Temple of Solomon). Second, in the 1820s and the 1830s, strong antiMasonic sentiments swept the United States, partly in response the 1826 kidnaping and alleged murder of William Morgan, who had written a scathing exposé of the Society. Initially as a reform movement and then as an organized political party, anti-Masons accused Freemasons of the usual sins: neglect of family, irreligion, intemperance, exploiting republican institutions for personal benefit, and of course plotting to overthrow the U.S. government. The anti-Masonic movement gained momentum as a crusade against elitism, especially because many Freemasons, like Fortunato in the story, were men of power and wealth. In addition, anti-Masonry was fueled by a fear of secrecy itself. Somewhat paradoxically, the Masons were given to the public display of their signs, regalia, and ceremonies, so it is no wonder that they acquired a reputation as a mysterious order with “a peculiar system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols.”35 Poe undoubtedly would have known of the sensational charges against the Masons, especially since he was personally acquainted with William Wirt, who ran as the Anti-Masonic presidential candidate in 1832.36 The ironic reversals in “The Cask of Amontillado” therefore bear directly upon the politics of literary meaning in antebellum America. Fortunato, proud of his superior taste, allows himself to be tricked by the vengeful Montresor, who pretends to have purchased a wine whose quality he cannot judge. In the midst of the story, Fortunato makes a secret gesture of Masonic brotherhood, which Montresor fails to understand. When Montresor nevertheless claims to be a Mason, Fortunato somewhat tauntingly cries “impossible,” which prompts Montresor to produce the literal origin of Fortunato’s symbolic rank, or more accurately the literal equivalent of the symbol of Masonic power. Montresor, in other words, re-literalizes the symbol in order to overthrow a formidable coterie which had grown strong behind the veil of allegory. As I shall argue in Chapter Eight, this radical impulse to

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re-literalize the symbol would ultimately give rise to a new literary form—the detective story—and to a culture whose surfaces are not rent by deep undercurrents of meaning. The transition to a culture of surfaces can be traced in Poe’s shifting attitude toward Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom Poe reviewed on several occasions between 1842 and 1847. Although Hawthorne’s early dedication to short fiction allowed Poe to ignore the ascendance of the novel, the Hawthorne reviews nevertheless register, in numerous ways, the unresolved contradictions of the publishing environment. As was the case with Dickens, Hawthorne’s work challenged the theory of the single effect by raising questions about divided audiences and divided levels of meaning. Unlike Dickens, however, Hawthorne was not, in Poe’s view, a writer capable of satisfying both the critical and the popular taste. In fact, this alleged unpopularity seems to have inspired Poe to retract his early praise of Hawthorne’s genius. Prior to 1847, Poe on several occasions celebrated Hawthorne as a talented writer condemned to unpopularity because of his elegance and originality. Poe viewed “The Minister’s Black Veil,” for example, as a “a masterly composition of which the sole defect is that to the rabble its exquisite skill will be caviar” (ER, 574). In the 1846 preface to The Literati of New York City, Poe again described Hawthorne as an author of “extraordinary genius” who was “scarcely noticed by the press or the public.” Shortly thereafter, however, Poe changed his tune: “[I]f Mr. Hawthorne were really original, he could not fail of making himself felt by the public. But the fact is, he is not original in any sense” (ER, 579). It should be noted that Hawthorne himself played a role in crafting his image as an unpopular writer. In the preface to “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” for example, Hawthorne claims to occupy an “unfortunate position” between the transcendentalists and “the great body of pen-and-ink men who address the intellect and the sympathies of the multitude.” Acceptable to neither group, Hawthorne fears that “he must necessarily find himself without an audience.” Poe would not have been pleased by this invidious division of the literary world, which left no room for Poe himself. In addition, it is possible that Poe was annoyed by Hawthorne’s avowal of an “inveterate love of allegory,” and he may have been put off by Hawthorne’s fanciful conceit of referring to himself in the third person, as one “M. de l’Aubépine.”37 But whatever motivated Poe’s disaffection, his explicit position pertains to the difference between literary merit considered as unfulfilled potential and literary merit considered as the achievement of a definite effect. At one time, Hawthorne’s relative anonymity could be attributed to the fact that he was neither “a man of wealth nor a quack,” but according to Poe, Hawthorne’s continued unpopularity indicates that his work suffers from more fundamental flaws. One of these flaws involves Hawthorne’s failure to achieve the effect of originality. The argument occasionally rambles, but Poe makes a crucial and startling break with his earlier positions. For the first time, Poe explicitly identifies

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the popular reader, rather than the critical reader, as the locus and measure of the literary effect: It is often said, inconsiderately, that very original writers always fail in popularity— that such and such persons are too original to be comprehended by the mass. “Too peculiar,” should be the phrase, “too idiosyncratic.” It is, in fact, the excitable, undisciplined and child-like popular mind which most keenly feels the original. (ER, 579)

To explain the problem of excessive originality, Poe invokes the example of Thomas Moore, the same writer who inspired his comments on “the horrid laws of political economy.” In this case, however, Poe is concerned with a surplus of novelty rather than beauty: “there is clearly a point at which even novelty itself would cease to produce the legitimate originality, if we judge this originality, as we should, by the effect designed: this point is that at which novelty becomes nothing novel” (ER, 579–80). So although an individual tale by Hawthorne may have the air of originality, repeated perusal of his work destroys this first impression. In other words, Hawthorne inclines toward “metaphysical” rather than literary novelty, and for this reason Poe classifies him as a “peculiar” rather than an original writer. Reviving his concern for the use-value of literature, Poe rejects Hawthorne’s version of novelty because it prevents the mass audience from acting as a producer of meaning. This argument builds upon Poe’s 1842 review of Hawthorne, which distinguished between the one aim of poetry (the Beautiful) and the many aims of the tale (truth, horror, passion, or “a multitude of such other points”). In the 1842 review, Poe was already characterizing the tale as a species of composition whose “products are never so rich, but infinitely more numerous, and more appreciable by the mass of mankind” (ER, 573). In his 1847 review, Poe places even greater stress on the capacity of an original tale to appeal to the mass of mankind. Whereas an original poem aspires to reawaken an elite reader’s sense of distant, supernal beauty,38 the original tale is that which “in bringing out the half-formed, the reluctant, or the unexpressed fancies of mankind, or in exciting the more delicate pulses of the heart’s passion, or in giving birth to some universal sentiment or instinct in embryo, thus combines with the effect of apparent novelty, a real egotistic delight” (ER, 581). For the mass audience, in other words, the use-value of reading consists not in intimations of unreachable bliss but in appeals to common fancies and desires. This means that the writer—especially the writer of genius—should occupy a middle ground between absolute novelty and common knowledge. According to Poe, an author like Frederick Marryatt fails to provide “the slightest incentive to thought” because his ideas are already “the common property of the mob, and have been their common property time out of mind” (ER, 325). Henry Cockton’s Stanley Thorn is likewise of little value because “its readers arise from its perusal with the identical ideas in possession at sitting

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down” (ER, 177). Significantly, then, the popular text is not simply the repository of what is universally known; it is instead a site at which writer and reader produce meaning through collaborative labor: [The reader] feels and intensely enjoys the seeming novelty of the thought, enjoys it as really novel, as absolutely original with the writer—and himself. They two, he fancies, have, alone of all men, thought thus. They two have, together, created this thing. Henceforward there is a bond of sympathy between them, a sympathy which irradiates every subsequent page of the book. (ER, 581)

Admittedly, Poe substitutes a private communion between solitary individuals for the general relation between an author and a mass readership. In addition, Poe implies that the “sympathy” is merely another effect achieved through deliberate manipulation. Clearly, however, Poe has come a great distance from his 1836 claim that great writers should have no “communion with low, or even with ordinary intellect” because “the holy—the electric spark of genius is the medium of intercourse between the noble and more noble mind” (ER, 314). In the 1847 Hawthorne review, Poe identifies the prose tale as a form well suited to “serve the purposes of ambitious genius” even though it requires an author to traffic in the most common thoughts and sentiments. In fact, it is this requirement which accounts for Hawthorne’s commercial failure. Neglecting the effect of his tales on the general reader, Hawthorne employs a kind of originality that “cannot fail to prove unpopular with the masses.”39 Hawthorne’s second major flaw stems from his fondness for allegory. According to Poe, this second flaw is also related to Hawthorne’s neglect of the mass reader: But at his failure to be appreciated, we can, of course, no longer wonder, when we find him monotonous at decidedly the worst of all possible points—at that point which, having the least concern with Nature, is the farthest removed from the popular intellect, from the popular sentiment and from the popular taste. I allude to the strain of allegory which completely overwhelms the greater number of his subjects, and which in some measure interferes with the direct conduct of absolutely all. (ER, 582)

Poe goes on to enumerate his objections to allegory: it is an ingenious but silly form; it can arouse no deep emotions in the reader; it can never enforce a truth; it destroys all sense of earnestness and verisimilitude; and it always interferes with “that unity of effect which, to the artist, is worth all the allegory in the world” (ER, 583). But the main point concerns the conflict between the few and the many. Once again breaking from his previous positions, Poe criticizes the judgment of “the few who belong properly to books”: The few, also, through a certain warping of the taste, which long pondering upon books as books merely never fails to induce, are not in condition to view the errors of a scholar as errors altogether. At any time these gentlemen are prone to think the

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public not right rather than an educated author wrong. But the simple truth is, that the writer who aims at impressing the people, is always wrong when he fails in forcing that people to receive the impression. How far Mr. Hawthorne had addressed the people at all, is, of course, not a question for me to decide. His books afford strong internal evidence of having been written to himself and his particular friends alone. (ER, 583)

In some respects, of course, this merely repeats the economic extremism of the “Berenice” letter, where Poe insists that the value of a tale “will be estimated better by the circulation of the Magazine than by any comments upon its contents.”40 But in his 1847 review of Hawthorne, Poe lends an air of righteous indignation to this position by contrasting the allegories of the few with the discourse of the many. Poe sharpens the contrast by suggesting that Hawthorne turned to allegory while under the influence of an intellectual coterie. Curiously, in the 1842 review Poe explicitly rejected the idea that such a coterie had created Hawthorne’s reputation: “We had supposed, with good reason for so supposing, that he had been thrust into his present position by one of the impudent cliques which beset our literature . . . but we have been most agreeably mistaken” (ER, 574). By 1847 Poe is no longer so sure, and he revisits his original suspicions. As Poe explains in the later review, Hawthorne’s “spirit of ‘metaphor run-mad’ is clearly imbibed from the phalanx and phalanstery atmosphere in which he has been so long struggling for breath” (ER, 587). Not incidentally, Poe followed this same strategy in the review of R. H. Horne. There, Poe also attempted to shift the blame for allegory from the author to a transcendental phalanx, arguing that Horne had been “infected” by a “junto of dreamers.” It appears, in other words, that Poe had taken it upon himself to rescue (and perhaps de-program) those writers who had fallen into the clutches of an evil transcendentalist cult. But regardless of whether Hawthorne had acted freely or under the sway of some “impudent clique,” the literary flaws in his work were all attributable to his neglect of the mass audience. Identifying this audience as the proper target of the single effect, Poe for the first time treated popularity as a sign of intrinsic literary value. Dickens and Hawthorne severely tested Poe’s critical consistency, and in each case a central critical tenet foundered on the rock of popularity. Importantly, each of these principles—concerning unity, novelty, and the status of the mass reader—was formulated in response to fundamental material changes in the publishing environment. The principle of unity of effect was essentially an argument for brief, well-digested, and portable units of signification, but the popularity of Dickens and the novel in general forced Poe to relegate plot unity from an absolute requirement to a simple preference of the critical reader. The principle of novelty, as we have seen, arose not only from the prevailing ideology of progress but especially from the material crisis of overproduction and the ensuing competition among writers for increasingly

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meager compensation. Confronted by the example of an author who was both original and unpopular, Poe reversed his initial judgment and claimed that Hawthorne evinced not true literary novelty but mere peculiarity. This, as we have seen, enabled a partial rehabilitation of the theory of the single effect, and it also enabled Poe to align himself with the common reader by waging battle against exclusive intellectual coteries. The most important development in Poe’s criticism centered on the mass reader, for in making this reader the measure of literary effectivity, Poe redrew the ultimate horizon of literary meaning. Poe’s early writings frequently hint at a transcendent meaning whose attainment would be tantamount to destruction.41 In Poe’s later critical writings this impulse toward transcendent meaning survives in the theory of poetic beauty. In an 1842 review of Longfellow, for example, Poe describes the poetic sentiment as “a wild effort to reach the beauty above” and as “a prescient ecstasy of the beauty beyond the grave.”42 But when it came to prose writing for the mass audience, Poe reoriented the horizon of meaning from a point of transcendent beauty to a plane of multitudinous effects. In this new order, literary meaning was not annihilated by contact with some distant star or heavenly being, but when it disseminated itself so completely among the mass audience that it became common knowledge. Since the publishing industry enforced a relation of dependency between the tale and the common reader, Poe was also troubled by the opposite possibility, that of too great a separation between text and audience. One danger of this separation, the possible incomprehensibility of the text, informs much of his criticism, especially his attack on allegory and metaphysical originality.43 But Poe also worried about the converse danger, namely an author’s inability to comprehend the thoughts, sentiments, and signifying practices of the common reader. In other words, Poe—who always imagined himself under the gaze of the literate masses—sometimes conceded that it was necessary to look back. Poe’s most striking attempt to look back is recounted in “The Man of the Crowd.” Headed with an epithet from La Bruyère, “That great misfortune, the inability to be alone,”44 the tale concerns itself with the menacing emergence of the urban masses. The narrator, relaxing at the bow-window of a London coffeehouse, becomes intrigued with the “dense and continuous tides of population” passing by on the busy street outside. At first the narrator “looked at the passengers in masses, and thought of them in their aggregate relation.” Before long he “descends” to the details and begins to observe “with minute interest the innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance.” What really follows, however, is an extended analysis of the social division of labor as manifested on a busy urban thoroughfare. By their demeanor and dress, he picks out noblemen, merchants, attorneys, tradesmen, and stock-jobbers. “Descending in the scale of what is termed gentility,” he next finds “darker and deeper themes for speculation” among those

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who more properly belong to the urban masses: peddlers, street beggars, feeble invalids, young girls “returning from long and late labor to a cheerless home,” women “of all kinds and of all ages,” innumerable varieties of drunkards, and besides all these, “piemen, porters, coal-heavers, sweeps; organ grinders, monkey exhibitors, and ballad-mongers, those who vended and those who sang; ragged artisans and exhausted laborers of every description, and full of a noisy and inordinate vivacity which jarred discordantly upon the ear, and gave an aching sensation to the eye” (PT, 391–92). As nightfall brings forth “every species of villainy” into the gaslit street, the narrator’s attention is drawn to an old man whose countenance displays an “absolute idiosyncrasy of expression.” Wondering “how wild a history is written within that bosom,” the narrator dashes out of the coffeehouse and trails the old man through the drizzly streets of London from dusk until dawn. Wending his way through all manner of urban scenes, the narrator realizes that the old man becomes pale and desperate when alone, but is energized by a diabolic vitality when in the midst of a group. At dawn, after the old man has returned to the busy thoroughfare of the previous day, the narrator despairs of comprehending his dark history. “This old man,” the narrator believes, “is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, or of his deeds” (PT, 396). Then the story concludes with the same German phrase it began with—er lasst sich nicht lessen—which Poe has already translated as “it does not permit itself to be read.” At this moment, the horizon of Poe’s publishing environment has shifted from transcendental to collective meaning, for his ultimate secrets no longer reside in the stars but in the conspiring hearts of the people of the crowd. The tale therefore serves as a kind of parable of the predicament Poe faced as a commercial writer. Confronted by the specter of overproduction, the commercial writer was impelled to seek out and appropriate all salable secrets, even the secrets of “deep crime” perpetrated in the city of mass consumption. An interest in urban mystery informed Poe’s invention of the detective tale, but as demonstrated in Chapter Eight, this invention offered no reprieve from the horrid laws of political economy. Like all intellectual property, secrets would lose their value at the point of revelation, just as Poe’s true artist would be annihilated upon integration into the masses.

IV. CONCLUSION In this brief inquiry into the political economy of literature, we have encountered several basic contradictions which Poe could neither resolve nor escape. The most curious contradiction involves the value and function of information in antebellum America, for in many ways information appeared as the enemy of commercial writers and other intellectual workers. Though early American

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leaders portrayed information as a safeguard to democratic stability, capitalists such as Eli Whitney recognized that a global communications network and a standardized form of meaning could minimize reliance on educated human beings or replace skilled labor altogether. Once such a network became operational, however, competition between capitalists caused a further upheaval in the signifying environment. As campaigns for internal improvements meshed with developments in the publishing industry, the social knowledge which had been painstakingly accumulated became increasingly accessible. This inspired both a systemic depreciation of common knowledge and a permanent passion for new information. In the literary market, where meaning was destined not for production but for consumption, the corresponding result was a passion for novelty. Due to lax copyright laws, heavy competition, and internal social pressures, it was difficult to establish ownership of intellectual property (such as stories, inventions, articles, and chemical formulae). In the publishing industry, the abundance of “unowned” works by ancient, foreign, and even domestic writers drove the cost of publishing downward to the cost of printing. As in the market for productive information, competition between publishers put a certain short-lived premium on new texts, although it must be said that most of these were new only in appearance and not in any fundamental sense. In fact, the apparent novelty of new texts derived from an increasing diversity of content, and this often entailed an increasing standardization at the (reproducible) level of form. The standardized unit of communication which resulted was not simply a commodity but rather an entertainment commodity whose attributes Poe painstakingly enumerated in his critical writings: condensed, unified, easily circulated, consumable in one sitting. The distinction between information and entertainment helps to clarify the nature of Poe’s publishing environment. In this environment, as we have seen, literature was created with means of production that were themselves salable commodities—“thinking material,” printing presses, and of course the intellectual labor of commercial writers. According to Karl Marx, such conditions signaled the advent of a relatively advanced stage of capitalist development in which social production had been divided (either conceptually or practically) into two great “departments,” one oriented toward the means of production or capital goods, the other oriented toward the means of consumption or consumer goods. Marx uses this distinction primarily to explain how a capitalist economy achieves moments of equilibrium despite an underlying tendency toward overproduction, but the distinction also sheds light on the emergence of a mass culture in antebellum America. In Poe’s lifetime, the publishing environment seemed to shift its orientation from department I (productive information) to department II (texts designed for mass consumption). Poe was undoubtedly struck by the difference between the kind of commercial information sought by merchants like John Allan and the kind of texts desired

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by the mass audience. And as noted at the beginning of this chapter, Poe’s urban experiences suggested a similar shift of emphasis from profitable to pleasurable signification, from the information metropolis to the city of mass consumption. Marx’s theory of economic departments is obviously debatable, but it has the advantage of rescuing such concepts as form and value from the misty realms of metaphysical speculation and redefining them according to Poe’s real material predicament. From Poe’s perspective, for example, it was much easier to ascertain the value of information (which facilitated profitable production) than the value of literature (which appealed to the shifting and sometimes unfathomable taste of the mass audience). In a different way, Marx’s theory also helps to clarify the material basis of literary form. Extrapolating from the different functions of the two economic departments, Marx at one point suggests that “department I” commodities must exist in a form which enables them to reenter the process of capitalist production.45 Poe of course did not employ the same terminology, but he shared this concern with the formal attributes of commodities, especially the literary commodities produced for the mass market. Significantly, Poe did not simply speculate about literary form. Instead, he tried to create or modify literary forms that could survive in the new publishing environment, ranging from poetry (“The Raven”) to criticism (“The Philosophy of Composition”) to fiction (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and other tales of ratiocination). As a commercial writer, Poe further understood how material conditions could determine not only the form of literature but of mental activity itself.46 In the September 1845 Broadway Journal, Poe combined many of his scattered impressions to describe the full impact of capitalist development on American culture and the American mind: The increase, within a few years, of the magazine literature, is . . . but a sign of the times, an indication of an era in which men are forced upon the curt, the condensed, the well-digested in place of the voluminous—in a word, upon journalism in lieu of dissertation. . . . I will not be sure that men at present think more profoundly than half a century ago, but beyond question they think with more rapidity, with more skill, with more tact, with more of method and less of excrescence in the thought. Besides all this, they have a vast increase in the thinking material; they have more facts, more to think about. For this reason, they are disposed to put the greatest amount of thought in the smallest compass and disperse it with the utmost attainable rapidity. Hence the journalism of the age; hence, in especial, magazines. (ER, 1377)

As Poe realized, changes in the publishing environment were accompanied by momentous and paradoxical changes in the emergent mass culture. From one perspective, the literate masses appeared to be the beneficiary of an endless diversity, which explains why Poe satirized popular texts for employing the “tone heterogeneous.” From another perspective, however, it seemed that the

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diversity required a more profound homogeneity, for as various meanings were pressed into equivalent signifying units, they all became, in some sense, the same. Daunted by this homogenizing tendency of mass culture, Poe paid special attention to the entities who emerged alongside the new forms of profitable or delightful signification. We have already encountered the literate masses and the Capital Reader; in succeeding chapters, we shall witness a more fanciful procession of readers: polymaths, explorers, detectives, police bureaucracies, dead souls, primitive computers, and even calculating angels. By so emphasizing the social and material conditions of writing, I may appear to be neglecting Poe’s special artistry, or his status as a unique psychic subject. In response, I can only plead that an exaggerated concern for the uniqueness of genius has more to do with the present than with Poe, who has been dead for these past 150 years, freed from all the petty burdens of selfhood. Furthermore, if anything about Poe has been neglected, it is precisely his relation to the masses, for not only was he born into a destitute and vaguely disreputable family, but his later upbringing no doubt turned this background into a source of shame. None of this will make sense, however, unless we also understand how industrialization and a massive campaign of internal improvements brought about irreversible changes in the publishing environment. With the advent of such changes, Poe’s idiosyncratic speculations about meaning, science, and poetry were taken up into the whirl of economic activity and transformed into social thoughts. The nature of these thoughts, and indeed, the nature of Poe’s achievement as an artist, cannot be understood apart from the material conditions of his world. In the following chapters, my aim is not so much to return to that world but to reproduce it for modern times.

PART T WO RACE AND REGION


Chapter Five AVERAGE RACISM POE, SLAVERY, AND THE WAGES OF LITERARY NATIONALISM Public opinion consists of the average prejudices of a community. (Coleridge) We would therefore propose . . . that history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization. . . (Fredric Jameson)

I

N RECENT YEARS the political and racial meaning of Poe’s work has been the focus of intense critical debate, and undoubtedly the positions generated from this debate will have enduring consequences, not only for Poe scholars, but for all those investigating the importance of race in American culture. As I have suggested in previous chapters, Poe’s lifelong struggle with the publishing industry constitutes a kind of deep politics that should matter more than his awkward and infrequent forays into partisan rhetoric. Poe, that is to say, should be distinguished from the public-spirited intellectuals of his age, for whereas these intellectuals embraced a wide variety of civic and political causes, Poe’s political agenda was conspicuously confined to problems of production, ranging from the poverty of authors to the corruption of publishers to the emergence of a vaguely ominous mass audience. To put such a theory to the test, it is necessary to consider what is conventionally seen as the single most important political struggle of antebellum America, namely the struggle over slavery that divided North from South and that culminated, a dozen years after Poe’s death, in a catastrophic civil war. In this chapter I argue that any investigation into Poe’s racial views should begin by acknowledging that in the 1830s, there were multiple racisms and multiple positions on slavery even in the South. In order to understand the complex relation between race and literature, moreover, it is also necessary to account for the pressures of literary nationalism and a national literary market, because these pressures put constraints on commercial writers in all regions and contributed to the always unfinished formation of what might be called average racism. For Poe and other antebellum writers, average racism was not a sociological

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measurement of actual beliefs but rather a strategic construction designed to overcome political dissension in the emerging mass audience. In other words, publishers and commercial writers were seeking a form of racism acceptable to white readers who were otherwise divided over the more precise issue of slavery. Fredric Jameson’s admonition about the textual nature of history, cited in the epigraph to this chapter, suggests the general difficulty of unraveling such political intricacies of the past. In the case of Poe and race, this task has been rendered doubly difficult by the texts themselves, because most are ambiguous, some are unsigned, and at least one does not even exist. Of all these real and imaginary texts, none is more controversial than the so-called PauldingDrayton review, an anonymous proslavery essay published in the April 1836 Southern Literary Messenger. On one side of the controversy stand those who attribute the review to Poe and who use it to document his “Southern” attitudes or, more explicitly, his virulent and flagrant racism. Many of these critics share some broad assumptions, not only about regionalism and ideology in antebellum America, but also about the aberrance of discredited doctrines from the past. It’s not that they find racism literally unthinkable. Instead, it might be said that for these and other critics, racism is only thinkable as the thought of a Southerner.1 On the other side of the dispute stand those who attribute the review to Beverley Tucker, law professor at the College of William and Mary and author of the first secessionist novel. The group favoring Tucker’s authorship comprises both literary critics who seek to defend Poe from charges of racism, and historians who, apparently oblivious to the whole controversy, seek only to clarify Tucker’s famous—or infamous—position on slavery and secession. As shall become clear, this ostensibly simple case of attribution raises fundamental questions about the meaning of authorship, questions that no interpretive approach can answer without recourse to history itself. The nature of the controversy is best illustrated by the glaring contradiction between two literary histories recently issued by Columbia University Press. In the Columbia Literary History of the United States, G. R. Thompson disavows Poe’s authorship and then argues that an 1849 review of James Russell Lowell is “the only instance of Poe’s taking any kind of stance on the issue of slavery” (269). In the Columbia History of the American Novel, Joan Dayan identifies Poe as the author of the Paulding-Drayton review, calling it “five of the most disturbing pages Poe ever wrote,” and relying upon it to expose his “ugly” theory that “the enslaved want to be mastered, for they love—and this is the crucial term for Poe—to serve, to be subservient” (98). Even by the most traditional definition of authorship, Thompson and Dayan are both wrong. As I shall demonstrate in this chapter, Thompson is in error because Poe did make several statements about slavery, and Dayan is wrong because her interpretation is based on a review that Poe did not write.2

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In order to explore all of the relevant evidence, I initially reserve judgment about the legitimacy of “author” and “authorial intent,” for by holding the fate of these concepts in abeyance, I am free to pose some basic questions: What can one know about Poe’s racial views? In what sense are Poe’s expressed views properly his own? What, if anything, can be deduced from Poe’s silences? And how should an author’s “racism” influence the interpretation of a literary text? Although these questions lead to further inquiries into authorship and literary nationalism, my ultimate aim in this essay is to lay the groundwork for a more historically informed criticism of race, a criticism that surpasses the prevailing rhetoric of praise and denunciation. In doing so I often find myself contending against those who, like myself, stress the social ramifications of Poe’s work; but if political criticism is to be more than politics as usual, it must fulfill a special burden of proof when it turns outward to the unconverted and the undecided.

I. THE RESILIENCE OF ERROR In April 1836 the Southern Literary Messenger published “Slavery,” an unsigned essay purporting to review two recent books: Slavery in the United States by James Kirke Paulding and The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of the Northern Abolitionists, an anonymous work generally attributed to William Drayton. The author of the review devotes only a few laudatory sentences to these works, reserving the bulk of the essay to develop an alternative justification for slavery. Instead of treating slavery as a necessary evil, the reviewer defends slavery as a positively beneficial institution that fulfills God’s will by creating a bond of sympathy between the inferior black slave and the superior white master. This bond grows stronger with the master’s “habitual use of the word ‘my,’ used as the language of affectionate appropriation, long before any idea of value mixes with it.” In other words, the young master “who is taught to call the little negro ‘his,’ . . . because he loves him, shall love him because he is his” (338). As long as “reciprocal obligations” are observed, concludes the reviewer, “society in the South will derive much more good than of evil from this much abused and partially-considered institution” (339). After James A. Harrison included the Paulding-Drayton review in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1902), many literary historians relied upon it to document Poe’s relation to his social and political surroundings.3 Later, however, an 1836 letter from Poe to Beverley Tucker raised important questions about the authorship of the review and the validity of interpretations that relied on it. In the letter, dated and postmarked 2 May 1836, Poe refers to “your article on Slavery” and then apologizes for having made some editorial alterations.4 First published in 1924 and later reprinted in John W. Ostrom’s

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1948 edition of Poe’s correspondence, the letter seemed to provide conclusive proof that Tucker had written the review and that Harrison had committed a major editorial blunder. As illustrated by “The Purloined Letter,” however, investigators often overlook the most obvious evidence, and many critics continued to attribute the Paulding-Drayton review to Poe long after Ostrom had displayed the letter in plain view. In their anthology Race and the American Romantics, for example, Vincent Freimarck and Bernard Rosenthal used the review to prove that Poe was “certainly the most blatant racist among the American Romantics.”5 Later, amid charges that he had perpetuated Harrison’s error, Rosenthal defended his choice by claiming that Poe’s letter to Tucker must be referring to a still undiscovered article or pamphlet rather than the Paulding-Drayton review.6 Rosenthal did not provide any definitive proof of Poe’s authorship, but he did raise enough doubts to excuse the continued depiction of Poe as a brazen advocate of slavery. In the Columbia History of the American Novel, Dayan accordingly mentions Rosenthal’s “excellent argument for Poe’s authorship” and then relies on the Paulding-Drayton review to demonstrate “how much Poe’s politics concerning slavery, social status, and property rights owed to the conservative tradition of the Virginia planter aristocracy” (96). Dayan does not explain how this planter ideology was assimilated by the child of itinerant actors and foster-son of a Scottish-born tobacco merchant; like many other literary critics, she implies that all white Southerners—even transplanted and temporary Southerners—held identical views on slavery. Significantly, even those dubious of the review tend to make similar generalizations. Kenneth Alan Hovey, for example, argues that Poe and Tucker held identical views on slavery, and that Poe may have written at least some of the essay.7 His support for this position rests on three rather questionable grounds: Poe apologized for making alterations; the review was anonymous; and the first five paragraphs “sound very much like Poe.” The last two points seem insufficient to overturn Poe’s own letter acknowledging Tucker’s authorship of an “article on Slavery.” The primary argument, concerning Poe’s apology for making “a few immaterial alterations,” is misleading. Hovey claims that “these alterations may not be so immaterial” because “Poe felt called upon to apologize for them, something he did not do for any other of his editings in the Southern Literary Messenger” (353). On the contrary, Poe did apologize for altering articles, especially articles written by the Messenger’s more esteemed contributors.8 Furthermore, Hovey implies that Poe was apologizing for additions to Tucker’s article, when in fact the young editor was apologizing for deletions: “I must also beg your pardon for making a few immaterial alterations in your article on Slavery, with a view of so condensing it as to get it in the space remaining at the end of the number. One very excellent passage in relation to the experience of a sick bed has been, necessarily, omitted altogether” (Letters, 1:90).


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Even when critics repudiate the Paulding-Drayton review altogether, they nevertheless seem rather eager to contain or enclose Poe’s views within a comfortably monolithic definition of racism. In a long chapter on The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, A. Robert Lee argues that “Poe’s Southern, racially phobic, imagination also plays into this Antarctica, a displaced Deep South and fantasy Eden despoiled and hexed by brute, carbon tribesmen.”9 Lee does some displacing of his own: first he depicts racism as a pathology peculiar to a Deep South which shall never rise again, and then he implies that this historical racism resided less in social practice than in what might be termed the Mind of the South. John Carlos Rowe offers a more complex argument about race and literature, but he too sees Poe’s racial views as a regional phenomenon. Attempting to emphasize Poe’s “Southern sentiments” and his “complicity with antebellum Southern legitimists,” Rowe states his case succinctly: “Poe was a proslavery Southerner and should be reassessed as such in whatever approach we take to his life and writings” (117). As I shall contend throughout, this position exonerates the North while it forestalls any further inquiry into the nature and complexity of race politics in the South. Approaches that restrict racism to the past have a similar effect. By depicting Poe’s racism as a universal antebellum trait that has forever vanished from existence, such accounts dismiss precisely what should be specified. Craig Werner, for example, locates Poe within prevailing antebellum conventions, arguing that his racism was “shared with the vast majority of his contemporaries, northern and southern.” Referring specifically to Race and the American Romantics, Werner then contends that “although there has been much discussion of Poe’s authorship of the [Paulding-Drayton] review, there seems little reason to doubt the general conclusions drawn by Freimarck and Rosenthal.”10 Rosenthal’s general conclusions, however, are far from clear. At times, he suggests that Poe’s literary works reflect the widely disseminated proslavery positions of John C. Calhoun and Thomas R. Dew, apologists who depicted slavery as a happy combination of political and biological law. At other times, he suggests that Poe viewed slavery as something altogether more insidious and terrifying. Rosenthal’s interpretation of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in fact emphasizes the horror of race relations in the South: Once comprehended, the ending of that novel reads as a potpourri of every racial cliché and of every racial nightmare that characterized the South. The blacks reflect the sustaining paradox underlying the southern mythology of Poe’s day. They are at once stupidly childlike and demonically monstrous. . . . Blacks impotently fear whites and possess the power to destroy them. The very existence of blacks evokes apocalyptic events, and the feared conflagration between the races destroys both black and white society. (Race and the American Romantics, 3)

Such a portrayal flatly contradicts the image of black-white relations in the Paulding-Drayton review. There, the author describes “a degree of loyal

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devotion on the part of the slave . . . and of the master’s reciprocal feeling of parental attachment to his humble dependent.” Far from depicting a climate of fear and distrust, the author claims that “these sentiments in the breast of the negro and his master are stronger than they would be under like circumstances between individuals of the white race.”11 Rosenthal simply ignores this contradiction. Instead of acknowledging the difference between a paternalistic defense of slavery and Poe’s “racial nightmare,” he asserts that “the recognition of [Poe’s] views does not necessarily require a reassessment,” because “there are no jarring incongruities between his politics and his art” (3). There are, however, many jarring incongruities between the Paulding-Drayton review and the body of work known to be by Poe. And until we can properly establish authorship, we shall also see jarring incongruities between those who attribute the review to Tucker and those who still cling to the notion that Poe wrote it. To resolve or prevent such incongruities, I shall make the case for Tucker’s authorship in the next section. My aim is not simply to produce a smoking gun, for that already exists in the 2 May 1836 letter from Poe to Tucker, and yet the authorship of the review is still disputed. To overcome the resilience of error, something more is required, namely an interpretive context that allows the letter to be seen as the smoking gun it most certainly is. So instead of offering a point-by-point refutation of Rosenthal, I shall focus on the ideological and stylistic similarities between the review and works known to be by Tucker. Even if there were no other corroborating evidence, these similarities would be enough to acquit Poe of the accusation, thereby expediting his arraignment on charges still pending.

II. THE CASE FOR TUCKER’S AUTHORSHIP As a rule, those who attribute the Paulding-Drayton review to Poe have a hard time even imagining that it was written by Beverley Tucker.12 Rosenthal claims that the May 1836 letter from Poe to Tucker represents “the sum total of evidence for Tucker’s authorship.” Dana Nelson reiterates this position; although she carefully avoids basing her interpretation of Poe on the review, she nevertheless reports that “Rosenthal traces the impossibility of attributing the essay to Tucker on the basis of extant evidence.”13 As demonstrated by a close examination of the evidence, however, Tucker is in fact the most likely of suspects. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker is today remembered as one of several proslavery advocates at the College of William and Mary, but he was in addition a judge, novelist, and active member of the group of Southern intellectuals which Drew Gilpin Faust has dubbed “the Sacred Circle.” From 1835 to 1837, Beverley Tucker also performed numerous offices for the Southern Literary Messenger, which was published just fifty miles away from Williamsburg in Rich-


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mond, Virginia. Aside from contributing lectures, poetry, and editorial material, Tucker assisted the magazine by writing favorable notices, selecting appropriate articles for publication, and even by correcting proof-sheets. Significantly, Tucker wrote eleven book reviews during this period. All of them appear as unsigned critical notices, all of them employ the editorial “we,” and many of them are intermingled with reviews written by Poe.14 When the Paulding-Drayton review was published in April of 1836, Tucker was also busy writing The Partisan Leader, the first secessionist novel in the United States. Because of his standing as law professor, Tucker issued the controversial book under a pseudonym in a vain attempt to conceal his authorship. As Tucker directed the publisher, “Keep dark. I do not wish to be known as the author of these things.” In the same letter, Tucker also discussed plans to secure the assistance of Thomas W. White, proprietor of the Messenger: “I could, if I would, make White praise it to the skies, but I must not give him any clue to me. He is incapable of secrecy.”15 Tucker’s situation, then, can be summarized as follows: 1) He contributed filler as well as numerous unsigned book reviews to the Messenger. 2) He had written several proslavery articles for the magazine and was in the midst of writing a proslavery novel. 3) He wanted to maintain a good relationship with the Messenger. 4) He wanted to protect the secrecy of at least some of his writings on slavery. Given these circumstances, it is certainly possible that Tucker turned some of his background reading for The Partisan Leader into a hastily written book review that Poe had to shorten—either for editorial or ideological reasons.16 Before examining the most direct evidence, however, it is important to recognize the strong political affinity between the Paulding-Drayton review and Tucker’s known works, especially since there is no such affinity between the review and texts by Poe. As shall become clear, Tucker’s proslavery writings contain numerous stock arguments and tropes that are duplicated in the Paulding-Drayton review. These include sentimental descriptions of sickbed scenes, the use of animal comparisons to explain human racial diversity, charges of Northern meddling followed by a Southern call to arms, the characterization of slavery as a positive good rather than a necessary evil, the invocation of Divine will to justify racial subordination, and (sophistical) resolutions of the conflict between equality and difference.17 Significantly, Tucker represented some of these arguments as his own unique or distinctive contributions to the proslavery position. In the Paulding-Drayton review, the author suggests that the beneficial “moral influence” of slavery has never been presented “by any writer, in as high relief as it deserves” (338). Tucker makes a similar claim in his “Essay on the Moral and Political Effect of the Relation between the Caucasian Master and the African Slave.” After characterizing slavery as “that beautiful system of domestic harmony, which, more than any thing else, foreshadows the blissful state in which love is to be the only law,” he adds: “They to whom these ideas are new may think they savor of paradox and

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extravagance. I am not aware that they have ever been publicly proclaimed by any one” (339). These ideas may not be as unusual as Tucker claims, but they do lend weight to the more specific stylistic and ideological similarities. Significantly, some of the most striking correspondences are the ones between the PauldingDrayton review and the novel that Tucker was in the midst of composing. For one thing, both maintain the same hard-line position. In the review, the author describes “Domestic Slavery” as “the basis of all our institutions” (337), and in the dedication to The Partisan Leader, Tucker refers to a “society whose institutions are based on domestic slavery.”18 In addition, both the review and the novel attack the universalizing philosophy that regards human beings “as a unit”: [Reviewer:] Such instances prove that in reasoning concerning the moral effect of slavery, he who regards man as a unit, the same under all circumstances, leaves out of view an important consideration. (339)

[Tucker:] If I am put to choose between rejecting the evidence of my own senses . . . or the philosophy which teaches that man is to be considered as a unit, because all of one race, philosophy must go by the board. (Partisan Leader 156)

In both the review and The Partisan Leader, there is also an unusual claim about sentiments in the slave “to which the white man is a stranger”: [Reviewer:] [W]e shall take leave to speak, as of things in esse, of a degree of loyal devotion on the part of the slave to which the white man’s heart is a stranger, and of the master’s reciprocal feeling of parental attachment to his humble dependent. . . . (338)

[Tucker:] But [the slave] spoke better than the peasantry of most countries, though he said some things that a white man would not say; perhaps, because he had some feelings to which the white man is a stranger. (Partisan Leader 71)

Poe might have agreed that people are not everywhere the same, but he was certainly not in the habit of attributing tender sentiments to slaves. In fact, one of Poe’s most scandalous statements on slavery—a statement discussed later in this chapter—holds that “the slave himself is utterly incompetent to feel the moral galling of his chain.”19 The author of the Paulding-Drayton review, on the other hand, made moral improvement the crux of the argument by emphasizing “the moral influences flowing from the relation of master and slave, and the moral feelings engendered and cultivated by it” (338). Tucker later reiterated this same position in “An Essay on the Moral and Political Effect of the Relation between the Caucasian Master and the African Slave.” Published in the June 1844 Messenger, the essay maintains that slavery has resulted in “the physical, intellectual and moral improvement of the inferior race, and, in some respects, of both.”20


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There are further similarities between the Paulding-Drayton review and The Partisan Leader. In the review, the writer describes the familial relation between white masters and black slaves. According to the reviewer, “[T]hese sentiments in the breast of the negro and his master . . . have their rise in the relation between the infant and the nurse. They are cultivated between him and his foster brother. They are cherished by the parents of both” (338). Tucker uses a dialogue passage in The Partisan Leader to develop the same position. Attempting to awaken proslavery sentiments in the young protagonist, one of the rebel leaders quizzes Douglas Trevor about his “black nurse” and his “foster” brothers and sisters; according to the rebel leader, these slaves “are one integral part of the great black family, which, in all its branches, is united by similar ligaments to the great white family.”21 Each passage starts by discussing nurses and foster-brothers and concludes by conjuring up an entire network of family ties. Poe felt no stable ties to any family, black or white, but Tucker made it a constant theme in his many defenses of Southern slavery. There are other similarities between the review and the novel which do not pertain directly to slavery. In the Paulding-Drayton review, the author uses a comet metaphor to illustrate a cyclical theory of history: [Reviewer:] But it is lamentable to observe, that let research discover, let science teach, let art practice what it may, man, in all his mutations, never fails to get back to some point at which he has been before. The human mind seems to perform, by some invariable laws, a sort of cycle, like those of the heavenly bodies. . . . Fifty years ago, in France, the eccentric comet, “public sentiment,” was in its opposite node. (337)

In The Partisan Leader, Tucker makes a similar argument about the cyclical nature of public sentiment: [Tucker:] The revolution in public sentiment which, commencing sixty years ago, had abolished all the privileges of rank and age; which trained up the young to mock at the infirmities of their fathers, and encouraged the unwashed artificer to elbow the duke from his place of precedence; this revolution had now completed its cycle.22

Rosenthal attempts to draw a parallel between the Paulding-Drayton passage about the cyclical course of a comet and Poe’s reference to Encke’s comet in “Hans Pfaall” (“Reexamination,” 34), but in his tale, Poe makes a straightforward scientific observation, whereas both Tucker and the reviewer use the cycle of heavenly bodies as a metaphor for “public sentiment” and the repetitive, nonprogressive course of human history. A survey of other works by Tucker reveals further correspondences in style and phrasing. The Paulding-Drayton review contains a short history of “the war against property” in England and France (337); in an essay on the commercial profession, Tucker likewise declares that “a war against property, in all

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its forms, has been openly proclaimed.”23 The author of the Paulding-Drayton review contends that “men are always passing, with fearful rapidity, between the extremes of fanaticism and irreligion” (337); in an 1835 review for the Southern Literary Messenger, Tucker remarks that at the commencement of the Restoration, the English people “wished no more” of Charles II than that he oppose “irreligion to fanaticism.”24 Two other phrases, common in Tucker’s writing and uncommon elsewhere, provide additional evidence. In many of his writings, Tucker raises an issue and then refrains from discussing it, presumably because he wants to keep to his central theme. Tucker generally avoids these potential digressions by saying “with that we have nothing to do.” The left column contains a passage from the Paulding-Drayton review, and the right column contains similar examples from other essays by Tucker: [Reviewer:] It is now about two hundred years since this latter spirit showed itself in England with a violence and extravagance which accomplished the overthrow of all the institutions of that kingdom. With that we have nothing to do; but we should suppose that the striking resemblance between the aspect of a certain party in that country then and now, could hardly escape the English statesman. (337)

[Tucker:] But, as I remarked at the outset, we have nothing to do with the origin of any particular mode of slavery.25 [Tucker:] With the philosophy of this we have nothing to do, and here again allow Mr. Bulwer to arrange his catenation of cause and consequence to his own mind.26 [Tucker:] But, gentlemen, with the wisdom or folly of these feelings we have nothing to do.27

The other phrase, common in Tucker and uncommon elsewhere, is “the march of mind.” In December 1834, long before Poe had returned to Richmond, Tucker published “A Lecture on the Study of the Law” in the Southern Literary Messenger. Immediately following his piece there appears an anonymous article called “The March of Mind,” which attacks, through irony and sarcasm, the prevalent faith in social and scientific progress.28 Tucker, likewise doubtful of all theories of human perfectibility, later made extensive use of the expression; to indicate his own skepticism toward progress, he generally put the phrase in quotations or italics: [Tucker:] How long it shall be before the “march of mind,” as it is called, in its Juggernaut car, shall pass over us, and crush and obliterate every trace of what our ancestors were, and what we ourselves have been, is hard to say.29


[Reviewer:] “Nulla vestigia retrorsum,” is a saying fearfully applicable to what is called the “march of mind.” (336)

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[Tucker:] Where would they now be in the march of mind, if, fifty years ago, they could have rooted themselves immovably in the conviction that there were “no secrets in Heaven and earth not dreamed of in their Philosophy.”30 [Tucker:] Others, indeed, listening to such flippant displays of perverse smartness, might come to a different conclusion, and suspect that, with less knowledge, the man might have had more sense. But these are old-fashioned thinkers, far behind “the march of mind.”31

Rosenthal’s final argument against Tucker’s authorship also concerns a matter of style, specifically Tucker’s punctuation. Noting that Tucker frequently used colons and semicolons, and that the Paulding-Drayton review contains “not a single colon . . . and only a few semicolons,” Rosenthal concludes that the review employs “a mode of punctuation that [Tucker] never used before nor after” (34). Taking into account the customary copy-editing practices and the brevity of the review (less than four full pages), such a claim carries little weight. But compare the absence of colons with the presence, again in less than four pages, of these characteristic Tucker phrases: “man as a unit,” “feelings to which the white man is a stranger,” “fanaticism and irreligion,” “the war against property,” “with that we have nothing to do,” and “the march of mind.” The stylistic similarities are so telling that Tucker might as well have signed the review. Combine all of the internal stylistic and ideological evidence with the 1836 letter acknowledging his article on “Slavery,” and the case for Tucker’s authorship is incontrovertible. What Poe said about the novel George Balcombe must also be said here, for the author of the Paulding-Drayton review “thinks, speaks, and acts, as no person . . . but Judge Beverley Tucker, ever precisely thought, spoke, or acted before” (ER, 979).

III. POE AND SLAVERY RECONSIDERED The resilience of the misattribution raises a number of important issues, not only about Poe’s racism, but also about the peculiar function that the concept of racism plays in critical discourse today. As noted above, some critics tend to identify racism as a collection of proslavery assumptions held primarily by antebellum Southerners. More recently, critics have emphasized the similarities between antebellum texts and current political struggles, but the discourse

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on race and literature continues to suffer from several limitations. Due in part to the continuing urgency of the issue, many neglect the historical context of race and instead resort to moralizing apologies, blanket denunciations, or fullblown jeremiads. These approaches, however, present fewer difficulties than the pervasive view of racism as a private sin or psychological malady rather than a longstanding, systemic condition perpetuated by powerful political and economic forces. In keeping with this personalizing tendency, most interpretations of Poe’s racism share some common assumptions: that he chose his racial attitudes freely or at least knowingly; that his attitudes could be expressed without constraint; and, by extension, that his expressions constitute a “true” record of his thoughts or feelings. These assumptions are open to attack from many theoretical positions, but I would like to proceed with a more basic investigation of the scene of literary creation. Aside from specifying the social determinations of racism, this investigation should help to clarify one of the most neglected issues in all of Poe criticism, namely the political and economic constraints on his writing. In order to understand these constraints, it is necessary to recall Poe’s predicament as editor or editorial assistant for the Southern Literary Messenger. Since this was also Poe’s first full-time editorial job, it cast a powerful shadow over his entire career in the industry of letters. Thomas Willis White, proprietor of the Messenger, conceived of his magazine as both a catalyst and beneficiary of a mass literary market in the South, but he also worked hard to cultivate a reputation as a national periodical. This reputation had little to do with actual demand, because the Lists of Payments described in Chapter Three reveal, for the first time, that White relied almost entirely on the South for revenue. In 1838, the middle year of White’s proprietorship, 90 percent of paid subscriptions were sent to slave states or areas, leaving only 10 percent for paid delivery in free states. The Messenger did not travel far even within the South, for of all paying subscribers, 48.9 percent lived in Virginia, with 18.2 percent residing in Richmond alone. Why, then, did White portray the Messenger as a national magazine? For one thing, he depended on the North for exchanges, contributions, and editorial favors, which helps to explains why the parsimonious proprietor mailed so many free copies to the offices of Northern newspapers and magazines.32 Notices in the Northern press enhanced the Messenger’s prestige, and since many Southern readers subscribed to Northern journals, this was also an effective (albeit circuitous) way to reach the target audience. For these reasons, White seldom passed up an opportunity to drop intimations of the Messenger’s “national” following. During a steamer ride up the James River, for example, White managed to convince antislavery travel writer J. S. Buckingham that although the Messenger was published in Richmond, it was “read extensively in every State in the Union.”33 This marketing strategy sometimes left White straddling both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. In the Messenger Prospectus, for example, White first af-


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firms and then denies any sectional bias. On the one hand, he bemoans the lack of Southern periodicals: In all the Union, south of Washington, there are but two Literary periodicals! Northward of that city, there are probably at least twenty-five or thirty! Is this contrast justified by the wealth, the leisure, the native talent, or the actual literary taste, of the Southern people, compared with those of the Northern? No: for in wealth, talents, and taste, we may justly claim at least an equality with our brethren; and a domestic institution exclusively our own, beyond all doubt affords us, if we choose, twice the leisure for reading and writing, which they enjoy.34

Immediately after making this oblique and approving reference to slavery, the Prospectus disavows all sectional animosity: It was from a deep sense of this local want, that the word Southern was engrafted on the name of this periodical; and not with any design to nourish local prejudices, or to advocate supposed local interests. Far from any such thought, it is the Editor’s fervent wish, to see the North and South bound endearingly together forever, in the silken bands of mutual kindness and affection. Far from meditating hostility to the north, he has already drawn, and he hopes hereafter to draw, much of his choicest matter thence; and happy indeed will he deem himself, should his pages, by making each region know the other better, contribute in any essential degree to dispel the lowering clouds that now threaten the peace of both, and to brighten and strengthen the sacred ties of fraternal love.

On the surface, these comments seem directed solely toward the North, but sectionalism—not to mention nullification—was also a highly charged issue within the South. In other words, White knew that many of his Southern readers were troubled by the growing sectional conflict, and he undoubtedly hoped to mollify these readers with a declaration of nationalist sentiments. The Prospectus accordingly exploits fears of Northern dominance, but at the same time it allows liberal or cosmopolitan readers to identify themselves with the image—if not the reality—of a progressive Southern intelligentsia. To maintain and expand his share of the Southern market, White therefore had to please an audience that was much less homogeneous than generally assumed, at least in regard to political affairs. The Messenger’s status as a literary magazine obviously made this task easier, for one of the preeminent ideological attributes of literature is its ability to present itself as a discourse free of ideology. Not surprisingly, White exploited the ostensible neutrality of literature in the Prospectus, claiming that “Party Politics and controversial Theology, as far as possible, are jealously excluded. They are sometimes so blended with discussions in literature or in moral science, otherwise unobjectionable, as to gain admittance for the sake of the more valuable matter to which they adhere; but whenever that happens, they are incidental only; not primary.” White, however, had so little confidence in his literary judgments that he generally

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deferred to Poe, and when he could not count on Poe, he begged advice from trusted supporters like Beverley Tucker and Lucian Minor. Perhaps because of his uncertainty about literary quality, White often assumed the role of censor, and he paid special attention to inflammatory political issues which might give offense and thereby drive off subscribers.35 A dispute over an article by “Nugator” (St. Leger Landon Carter) illustrates the Messenger’s aversion to partisan politics. During this period, the Democratic Party in Virginia still relied on the caucus system to nominate presidential candidates. In the April 1835 Messenger, Nugator claimed that the term “caucus” was derived from Cacus, son of Vulcan and “Prince of Robbers.” Viewing this as a slur against nominee Martin Van Buren, a writer in the Richmond Enquirer attacked Nugator as a “Whig Etymologist” and warned White to keep the Messenger “pure and unspotted from the pollution of party politics.”36 The Messenger responded immediately. Acting on instructions from White, editor Edward V. Sparhawk wrote to the Enquirer and disavowed any political designs. Pointing out that the issue contained an editorial disclaimer, and that Nugator was actually a Democrat, Sparhawk attempted to shield the Messenger behind a nonpartisan veil. Denying any intention “to make the Messenger a vehicle of political discussion,” Sparhawk maintained that the magazine was “happy to escape the atmosphere of Party, and breathe a calmer, if not a purer, air.”37 Ultimately, however, this apolitical stance was motivated less by purity than by profit, for as Sparhawk admitted in the letter, he feared that any involvement in “the strife of party politics” might “jeopardize the fair prospects of the Messenger.” Such fair prospects were imperiled by the growing controversy over slavery. Insofar as it emphasized the fundamental differences between North and South, the struggle over slavery obviously hindered the emergence of a truly national literary market. But as implied above, the slavery question also exposed internal divisions within the Messenger’s Southern audience. In such a market, economic and ideological forces became fused, and White accordingly attempted to cultivate an average racism that would appeal to a majority of his subscribers. Average racism, however, was easier said than done. White could safely defend the South from the attacks of Northern “fanatics,” but he was less certain about whether he should represent slavery as a positive good or a necessary evil, or whether he should take a position on African colonization, that is, on plans to deport American blacks to the African colony of Liberia. It might have been prudent to avoid such issues altogether, but this was not always possible. In February 1836, for example, Lucian Minor contributed an article purporting to review recent issues of the Liberia Herald. In his review, Minor praises the “unparalleled” success of Liberia, where once “a tangled and pathless forest frowned in a silence unbroken save by the roar of wild beasts,” but where today English literature thrives, and with it “those comforts, virtues


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and pleasures which the existence of Literature necessarily implies.”38 For Minor, literature indicates the overall level of social development, and the newspaper in particular serves as “the most expressive sign of all.” Even more expressive than newspaper itself, however, are the people who produce it. “What heightens—indeed what constitutes the wonder,” Minor continues, is that the editors, printers and writers “are all colored people.” By using the Liberia Herald as a method of “instancing the literary condition of the settlement,” Minor was obviously endorsing the work of the American Colonization Society. Founded in 1816, the Colonization Society enjoyed support in both the North and South for more than a decade. By the 1830s, however, the project of African colonization had come under attack by those maintaining more extreme positions in the debate over slavery. In 1832, for example, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and proslavery economist Thomas Dew both denounced colonization as a cruel, unworkable, and prohibitively expensive solution.39 Minor himself realized that his review might arouse controversy. After praising Liberia effusively, he accordingly disavowed any radical intent: “What we especially had in view, however, when we began this article, was neither rhapsody nor dissertation upon the march of Liberia to prosperity and civilization—unparalleled as that march is, in the annals of civilization—but a notice (a critical notice, if the reader please) of the aforesaid newspaper” (158). The disclaimer was hardly palliative, and this left White in something of a predicament. Since he relied heavily on Minor for articles and editorial advice, he could not simply reject it. But he was also loathe to embroil the Messenger in a dispute which might anger his subscribers. Characteristically, White decided to compromise. He ordered Poe to revise or delete the more controversial sections of the review. He also gave Poe the job of informing Minor about these revisions, and Poe dutifully told Minor that “it was thought better upon consideration to omit all passages in ‘Liberian Literature’ at which offence could, by any possibility, be taken” (Letters, 1:83). This incident, it should be noted, suggests another motive behind Poe’s “immaterial alterations” of the Paulding-Drayton review. If Poe censored a colonization article to avoid controversy in February, he may have censored Tucker’s proslavery article for the same reason in April. In any event, Poe’s revision of Minor’s article was not entirely successful. In a review of the February Messenger, the Augusta Chronicle denounced “Liberian Literature” as being “altogether unsuited to our Southern region, and as indicating a dangerous partiality for that most pestiferous and abominable parent of the Abolitionists, the Colonization Society.”40 The handling of Minor’s article nevertheless reveals something of the ideological constraints that the Messenger imposed upon even its most valued contributors. Significantly, the Messenger placed similar constraints on proslavery advocates like Beverley Tucker. “Notes to Blackstone’s Commentaries,” one of

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Tucker’s first substantial articles on slavery, appeared in the January 1835 Messenger. In the “Editorial Remarks” for this issue, the writer—probably James Heath—takes exception to Tucker’s general line of argument. Since these remarks represent the Messenger’s official position at its commencement, they are worth quoting at length: The able author of the “Note to Blackstone’s Commentaries,” is entitled to be heard, even on a subject of such peculiar delicacy. . . . Whilst we entirely concur with him that slavery as a political or social institution is a matter exclusively of our own concern . . . we must be permitted to dissent from the opinion that it is either a moral or political benefit. We regard it on the contrary as a great evil, which society will sooner of later find it not only its interest to remove or mitigate, but will seek its gradual abolition or amelioration, under the influence of those high obligations imposed by an enlightened christian morality.41

White felt obliged to print a more scathing response Tucker’s article in the next issue. Signed by “A Virginian,” the four-page rebuttal begins with a merciless refutation of Tucker’s position: I had supposed before, that no gentleman of any intelligence could be found within the four corners of our state, who would seriously undertake to maintain that our domestic slavery, which is obviously the mere creature of our own positive law, is so right and proper in itself, that we are under no obligation whatever to do any thing to remove, or lessen it, as soon as we can. I had thought, indeed, that it was a point conceded on all hands, that, wrong in its origin and principle, it was to be justified, or rather excused, only by the stern necessity which had imposed it upon us without our consent, and which still prevented us from throwing it off at once. . . . And, at any rate, I had imagined that all of us were fully satisfied, by this time, that [slavery] was an evil of such injurious influence upon our moral, political, and civil interests, that we owed it to ourselves as well as to our subjects, to reduce, and remove it, as soon, and as fast as possible.42

The rebuttal maintains this tone throughout, and it concludes by supporting both African colonization and the gradual elimination of slavery. Such incidents demonstrate that White could not prevent the Messenger from occasionally becoming “a vehicle of political discussion.” Nor could he arrive at an average racism that would satisfy both colonizationists and “positive good” theorists. He could only attempt to minimize his risks by restricting the number of articles on slavery, by censoring these articles whenever possible, by printing editorial disclaimers, and by encouraging any offended readers to respond with letters rather than canceled subscriptions. As indicated already, these methods were far from perfect. In January 1837, after Poe had been dismissed, the Messenger published a laudatory review of Beverley Tucker’s novel The Partisan Leader. The review, by Tucker’s friend Judge Abel P. Upshur, is less a literary assessment than a polemical disquisi-


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tion on the tariff, nullification, and states’ rights. White of course recognized that the review would arouse controversy, and he therefore appended the following disclaimer, probably written by Tucker himself: The review of the “Partisan Leader” is from the pen of one of the most accomplished scholars in Virginia. With the political opinions which it avows, we have nothing to do, and neither claim nor disclaim them, as our own. But although the Messenger has no connexion with the politics of the day, we see no reason for excluding from it, proper criticism upon political works. The “Partisan Leader,” is of a literary as well as of a political character, and, therefore, the strict neutrality of our miscellany cannot be impeached, on account of any such criticism as the work itself may demand or justify.43

The disclaimer fooled no one. On the Saturday morning following publication of the January issue, White chanced to meet Henry St. George Tucker in the Richmond market. The latter man had just received his copy of the Messenger, and he was still fuming over Upshur’s piece. Little suspecting the novel under review had been written by his own brother, Henry Tucker told White that he was canceling his subscription to the Messenger because “he could never countenance a publication that admitted in its pages such eccentrics as were advocated in the Review of the Partisan Leader.” White immediately informed Beverley Tucker of his brother’s reaction. He also complained that there had been 16 cancellations, none of them, he hoped, “on political grounds.” But White was clearly worried about the repercussions. He told Tucker that “the entire party are in a terrible consternation about the Review—and I hear that it and myself may expect a regular attack in Thursday’s Enquirer.” He also begged Tucker’s help, promising to send a copy of the Enquirer “by Friday’s stage—so that you may be able to reply to it for me at once.”44 Taken together, the articles by James Heath, Lucian Minor, and Beverley Tucker represent the full range of positions on slavery that could be articulated in the Messenger during its early years of operation.45 Articles in this Southern magazine did not uphold a single, consistent position on slavery; nor was the Messenger a forum for abolitionists and fire-eaters alike. Instead, the political spectrum of the magazine was bounded by gradualists or colonizationists at one extreme and positive-good secessionists at the other. White, moreover, only allowed these extremist positions to be defended by a few privileged contributors, and then only grudgingly. This policy, it should be emphasized, did not arise from any moral aversion toward slavery, but from White’s belief that controversial issues were bad for literary business. As indicated above, he had no desire “to jeopardize the fair prospects of the Messenger, by involving it in the strife of party politics.”46 The strictures on “party politics” applied to Poe as well, especially since he was not a privileged contributor but merely a paid assistant to White. It was Poe’s job, moreover, to implement and articulate the Messenger’s editorial

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policies, and on one occasion he found himself explaining that “the pages of our Magazine are open, and have ever been, to the discussion of all general questions in Political Law, or Economy—never to questions of mere party.”47 Obviously, then, there were implicit and explicit constraints on what Poe could say about slavery. Even if he had been a ranting abolitionist or a rabid secessionist, he would never have been able to express these views in the Southern Literary Messenger. White’s fear of political controversy called for positions that were less progressive than Minor’s and less reactionary than Tucker’s, and in fact all of Poe’s remarks on slavery for the Messenger fall between these two extremes. In his review of Anne Grant’s Memoirs of an American Lady, for example, Poe quotes a romantic description of slavery in colonial New York, claiming that these “remarks on slavery . . . will apply with singular accuracy to the present state of things in Virginia.”48 In the quoted passage, Grant maintains that in Albany, “even the dark aspect of slavery was softened with a smile.” Rosenthal sees this as being consonant with “the standard pro-slavery argument” (30), but as quoted in the Messenger, Grant distances herself from the proslavery position: “Let me not be detested as an advocate of slavery, when I say that I think I have never seen people so happy in servitude as the domestics of the Albanians” (511). Less important than the remarks themselves, however, is the regional identification of the speaker. Northern apologies for slavery were highly coveted by Southerners, and for a fledgling magazine such as the Messenger, these apologies had the added attraction of mitigating—or appearing to mitigate—sectional differences in the national literary market. In Joseph Holt Ingraham’s The South-West. By a Yankee, Poe found another Northerner who was willing to pardon the peculiar institution. In an account of his travels through Louisiana and Mississippi, Ingraham pauses on several occasions to excuse, if not to defend, Southern slavery. After passing a group of slaves purchased in Virginia and bound for a plantation outside New Orleans, Ingraham remarks that “they all appeared contented and happy, and highly elated at their sweet anticipations.” “Say not,” Ingraham continues, “that the slavery of the Louisiana negroes is a bitter draught.”49 Such pronouncements inspired the following comment, which remains Poe’s most explicit statement on slavery: The “Yankee,” in travelling Southward, has evidently laid aside the general prejudices of a Yankee—and, viewing the book of Professor Ingraham, as representing, in its very liberal opinions, those of a great majority of well educated Northern gentlemen, we are inclined to believe it will render essential services in the way of smoothing down a vast deal of jealousy and misconception. The traveller from the North has evinced no disposition to look with a jaundiced eye upon the South—to pervert its misfortunes into crimes—or distort its necessities into sins of volition. He has spoken of slavery as he found it—and it is almost needless to say that he found it a


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very different thing from the paintings he had seen of it in red ochre. He has discovered, in a word, that while the physical condition of the slave is not what it has been represented, the slave himself is utterly incapable to feel the moral galling of his chain.50

Poe here follows a double strategy. He obviously seeks to defend the South from Yankee “prejudices,” but at the same time he attempts to “smooth down” the growing sectional divide by appealing to the liberal opinions of “the great majority of well educated Northern gentlemen.” His position on slavery likewise seems directed toward a racist majority. Without advocating any specific policy, he first concedes the “misfortunes” of slavery and then assures his readers that these misfortunes cause little injury to the slaves themselves. In other words, Poe dodges the slavery question by shifting the argument to common ground—only in this case the common ground is racism. In many ways, Poe’s statement accords with the “moderate” Messenger position articulated in 1835 by James Heath. Unlike Heath, however, Poe failed to advocate even the gradual elimination of slavery. He also seemed hesitant about taking a position on colonization. As editor of the Messenger, Poe frequently discussed other monthly magazines, and in the October 1835 North American Review, he stumbled upon a long and favorable review of Ralph Gurley’s Life of Jehudi Ashmun, Late Colonial Agent in Liberia. After quoting a laudatory account of Ashmun’s character, Poe admits that he is “willing to believe” this description, and he also concedes that Ashmun “was a noble martyr in the cause of African colonization.” But Poe wonders why the reviewer selected this particular book: We doubt, however, if there are not a crowd of books daily issuing unnoticed from the press, of far more general interest, and consequently more worthy the attention of our leading Review than even The Life of Ashmun. We shall soon, perhaps, have a Life of some Cuffy the Great, by Solomon Sapient; and then the North American will feel itself bound to devote one half of its pages to that important publication.51

“Cuffy,” derived from an African word for Friday, was a common given name among American blacks; in this context it may also allude to Paul Cuffee (1759–1817), a black shipowner, Quaker, and political activist who helped establish a colony of African Americans in Sierra Leone.52 Poe’s remarks up to this point therefore suggest a willingness to belittle any text supportive of African colonization. But then, as if stepping back from the threshold of partisan politics, Poe immediately modifies his position: “In expressing ourselves thus, we mean not the slightest disrespect to either Ashmun or his Biographer. But the critique is badly written, and its enthusiasm outré and disproportionate.” The rest of Poe’s reviews in the Southern Literary Messenger have little or nothing to add to these brief statements, indicating that he avoided taking a

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specific position on slavery and instead attempted to embrace an average racism that would appeal to a majority of subscribers. Despite this evidence, many critics nevertheless accuse Poe of sharing the views of the most extreme proslavery advocates. Kenneth Alan Hovey, for example, contends that Poe’s social views “are essentially identical” to those expressed by Beverley Tucker in the Paulding-Drayton review (“Critical Provincialism,” 347). Others identify Poe with the proslavery, anti-colonization position of Thomas Dew, political economist and President of the College of William and Mary. Joan Dayan notes that Poe corresponded with Dew and wrote the introduction to his “Address” for the Southern Literary Messenger.53 John Carlos Rowe refers to Poe’s “undisputed admiration” for Dew, and Dana Nelson observes that Poe revealed his true sentiments “particularly in his stance on works by the noted Southern defender of slavery, Thomas R. Dew.” All of these critics echo Bernard Rosenthal’s claim that “Perhaps the most telling fact about Poe’s position on slavery is his record of public admiration for Thomas R. Dew, the man most fully identified with the extreme and articulate slavery apologetics of Poe’s day.”54 Aside from insinuating guilt by association, this position rests upon a fundamental misconception of Poe’s work and work-related constraints at the Messenger. Thomas Dew was an important supporter of the magazine, for in addition to contributing articles directly, he was also in a position to influence many other subscribers and potential subscribers. And since he was president of the College of William and Mary, the Messenger could not offend Dew without imperiling the substantial patronage of college faculty, students, and alumni. Even if Poe had wanted to express disapproval of Dew, White would never have permitted it. Moreover, the particular text upon which this whole argument rests was originally composed not by Poe but by Dew himself, a fact overlooked by nearly everyone. The text in question is Poe’s October 1836 review of Dew’s welcoming address to the entering class. In order to write the review, Poe asked Dew for a copy of the address (published in the next issue of the Messenger) and for general information about the college. Dew responded with what we would today call a press release, and Poe merely revised it for his review. Dew’s letter was reprinted in the standard edition of Poe’s works, and it is a simple matter to identify the blatant similarities between Poe’s review and Dew’s press release. In a 1941 dissertation on the canon of Poe’s critical works, which Rosenthal explicitly cites, William Hull in fact demonstrates that the six basic points in Poe’s review are all derived, nearly verbatim, from the letter by Dew. I list only a few examples. [Dew:] The numbers at Wm & Mary have rarely been great, & yet she has turned out more useful men, more great statesmen than any other college in the world in proportion to her alumni. (Hull, “A Canon,” 159) [Poe:] The number has at no time been very great it is true; and yet, in proportion


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to her alumni, this institution has given to the world more useful men than any other—more truly great statesmen. (Southern Literary Messenger, 2:721) [Dew:] The scenery here, the hospitable population, the political atmosphere all conspire to give a utilitarian character to the mind of the student. Hence the alumni of this college have always been characterized by business minds & great efficiency of character. (Hull, “A Canon,” 160) [Poe:] Perhaps the scenery and recollection of the place, the hospitable population, and political atmosphere, have all conspired to imbue the mind of the student at Williamsburg with a tinge of utilitarianism. Her graduates have always been distinguished by minds well adapted to business, and for the greatest efficiency of character. (721) [Dew:] The high political character of old Va. is due to this college. (Hull, “A Canon,” 159) [Poe:] To William and Mary is especially due the high political character of Virginia. (721)

Rosenthal quotes this final passage to show that Poe “singled out for praise [Dew’s] special achievement,” namely his advocacy of an extreme proslavery position. As indicated above, however, Poe singled out nothing—he merely made minor stylistic changes in a press release that the Messenger was obliged to publish. Clearly, then, the “guilt by association” strategy is subject to abuse and manipulation. Rosenthal claims that Hull’s dissertation “gives meticulous evidence establishing Poe’s authorship” of the review in question, but Hull in fact gives meticulous evidence which confounds the very concept of authorship by demonstrating Poe’s reliance on a text he couldn’t refuse.55 Further arguments about Poe’s racism have been based on his alleged review of John L. Carey’s Domestic Slavery. The problem here concerns not authorship but existence, for the review was never published, and no manuscript copy has ever been located. Rosenthal and Nelson nevertheless contend that the review demonstrates Poe’s “proslavery sympathies.”56 This claim merits special consideration, because it is one of the most egregious examples of the guilt-by-association strategy practiced by Rosenthal and theoretically justified by Rowe. Reports about the purported content of the review are based on Poe’s June 1840 letter to Joseph E. Snodgrass, editor of the American Museum and later of the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. Snodgrass had sent Poe a copy of Carey’s book so that he might review it for Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. In a letter to Snodgrass, Poe explained why the review did not appear: Mr. Carey’s book on slavery was received by me not very long ago, and in last month’s number I wrote, at some length, a criticism upon it, in which I endeavored to do justice to the author, whose talents I highly admire. But this critique, as well as some six or seven others, were refused admittance into the Magazine by Mr. Burton,

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upon his receiving my letter of resignation. . . . I fancy, moreover, that he has some private pique against Mr. Carey (as he has against every honest man) for not long ago he refused admission to a poetical address of his which I was anxious to publish. (Letters, 1:138)

There are several reasons to question the sincerity of this letter. First, Poe was eager to tarnish the reputation of his former employer; as he later told Snodgrass, “Burton . . . is going to the devil with the worst grace in the world, but with a velocity truly astounding” (Letters, 1:152). Second, Poe was caught up in a network of puffing and promotion that included both Carey and Snodgrass. In December 1839, Poe (relying on Snodgrass as a go-between) had sent a copy of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque to Carey, who was then editor of the Baltimore American; shortly thereafter, Carey responded by publishing a favorable review (Poe Log, 281). In addition, Poe was at this time cultivating Snodgrass as a supporter of his magazine project. When Snodgrass sent Carey’s book to Poe, that is, when Snodgrass acted as a go-between in the other direction, Poe may have felt obliged to return Carey’s original favor. Given these circumstances, Poe may have felt that a disparaging review would appear ungrateful to both Carey and Snodgrass—editors whose support Poe still wanted. He would therefore have been inclined to express a favorable opinion of Carey’s book, and since the review was not published, this approval—whether feigned or genuine—cost him nothing. This in turn raises the possibility that Poe never reviewed Carey’s book at all. If Poe had written a review, Snodgrass would certainly have been willing to publish it in the Visiter; as indicated below, Snodgrass ultimately went on to publish several reviews of Carey’s works. In other words, it is entirely possible that conclusions about Poe’s racism are being drawn from a review that never existed, for Poe may have responded to Snodgrass’s inquiry with a complete, yet plausible, fabrication. Disregarding these considerations, Rosenthal nevertheless claims that “even a review mildly sympathetic to Carey’s views would place one in a position of sympathy with the South’s pro-slavery orthodoxy” (“Reexamination,” 30). Aside from its scanty foundation in fact, this argument suffers from two additional weaknesses which are characteristic of regionalist reasoning. First, it collapses the differences between a union-loving colonizationist like Carey and a positive-good secessionist like Tucker. As already demonstrated, in the 1830s there were several orthodoxies vying for dominance. Carey himself attempts to sort out these contending positions within the South: I take it upon myself to say, that the people of the south have manifested no backwardness in relation to the question of domestic slavery. The time was not long ago, when this subject was discussed with freedom throughout the southern states. It was becoming a matter of anxious solicitude; for it concerned them dearly. The process of effectual reformation was going on it its legitimate way; truth was coming to the


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minds of the reflecting in the light of their own experience, and was operating upon the unforced will. The evil of slavery was generally acknowledged; for I am persuaded that the sentiments which were declared some time ago, by Gov. McDuffie, of South Carolina, were not held then by the intelligent portion of southern people.57

In the conflicted political environment of Baltimore, Carey concocts a position that mixes racism with a mild form of antislavery activism. On the one hand, he contends that two distinct races cannot peacefully coexist unless “the one be in subjection to the other” (34), and that abolitionists have only caused a hardening of Southern attitudes. On the other hand, he advocates colonization as a “safe and effectual system” capable of “delivering this country from the evil of slavery, with security at once to both races, and with a prospect of final good to the blacks” (112–13). It is therefore unclear what Poe might have said in his attempt to “do justice to the author” of Domestic Slavery, if he made the attempt at all. Second and most importantly, images of a monolithic South falsify the true political terrain of the region. We have already seen some of the ideological dissension and diversity that characterized the Messenger in the 1830s; such diversity was even more pronounced in border states such as Maryland. Joseph Evans Snodgrass, for example, was actually attempting to encourage an antislavery movement within the South. The Baltimore Saturday Visiter had been marketed as a family newspaper devoted to art and literature, but by 1843, Snodgrass was publishing articles that defended and attacked slavery. In 1845 he used another book by John Carey (Slavery in Maryland, Briefly Considered) to solicit controversial reviews, two of which he later published separately as pamphlets. In the first of these (A Letter on Slavery, Addressed to John L. Carey), Dr. R. S. Steuart describes slavery as a kind of “tutelage,” which prepares savages for civilization and which—in due time—should be gradually eliminated. Later that year, however, Snodgrass published Slavery in Maryland: An Anti-Slavery Review, which attacks Steuart’s gradualist approach on moral and religious grounds. The author of this second pamphlet disputes the benevolence of slavery and further contends that colonization, or any plan to remove blacks from Maryland, would prove both cruel and unworkable. In the concluding section, the author refuses to apologize or temporize: It is in vain for the advocates of slavery to throw themselves into the breach that had been made in their bulwarks; their efforts will be powerless to arrest the progress of liberal opinions. They may attempt to overthrow the liberty of the press—they may strive to put a gag in the mouths of the free—but these efforts of expiring despotism will recoil upon themselves. . . . Can we allow our liberties to be wrested from us in order to perpetuate an institution that has been a blighting mildew on every land it has ever touched from the creation of the world? With a slow and almost imperceptible progress it has overshadowed the whole land, obscuring the moral vision of the people, and infecting the atmosphere of the mind. Like the malaria that encroaches

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on the Roman campagna, prostrating the energies of the inhabitants and spreading desolation and death around; unless its progress can be arrested, we shall be reduced to a feeble and degenerate people, crouching among the mighty works erected by our fathers.58

Signed by “A Virginian,” the pamphlet has been attributed to none other than James E. Heath, novelist, Virginia State Auditor, and sometime editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. Poe’s “associations,” then, exposed him to a diversity of positions on slavery, but even this does not mean that such positions could be freely chosen or freely advocated, especially in the Southern literary market. In the Anti-Slavery Review, for instance, the author counsels against establishing a newspaper devoted exclusively to emancipation, for he believes that a general publication with a few articles on slavery would reach more Southern readers: [The question] cannot be investigated effectually without some organ of public communication by which information may be diffused and the various plans brought forward, and fully discussed before the people. It, however, appears to me that a newspaper devoted to this especial object, would not effect so much as the introduction of suitable essays into the columns of papers already established. A paper devoted to emancipation would probably have but a limited circulation in the South, and that chiefly among persons already convinced. . .59

Snodgrass himself used similar arguments to elicit financial contributions from such notable abolitionists as Wendell Phillips, E. G. Loring, and Maria Weston Chapman. In an unpublished 1846 letter to Chapman, Snodgrass discusses the cost of sending his paper to “slave-holders and pro-slavery men in their feelings”: I was enabled by your funds to continue the Visiter to such, all along—at least as long as they were willing to receive it—contrary to any “cash rule”—for it may not be known to you that, with a few accessible cases in the cities and else where, I stop all papers sent out of Baltimore. You will say this ought not to have been done—so say I; but, however desirable to keep the paper in the hands of such, especially slaveholding people, I could do no better, and had therefore to succumb to the pressure of my circumstances. Were the friends of Reform to do their duty, papers of the Visiter’s class would be purposely left in the hands of the Slaveholders, just so long as there seemed the least chance of getting the pay.60

As indicated by the rest of the letter, Snodgrass was seeking Northern patronage so that he could carry on his antislavery campaign without succumbing to the “cash rule.” “We are,” he complained, “too few and feeble to stand alone as yet.” Circumstances proved him right. By discussing plans for the abolition of slavery, Snodgrass damaged both his reputation and the circulation of his paper. According to Dwight Thomas, many residents of Baltimore regarded


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Snodgrass as “a dangerous radical,” and journalist Jane Swisshelm, a dangerous radical herself, remembered Snodgrass as “a prominent Washington correspondent, whose anti-slavery paper had been suppressed in Baltimore by a mob.”61 As Poe learned in New York, pressure could also be exerted in the other direction. In 1845, Poe had become one of the editors of the Broadway Journal. For the March 22 issue, he wrote an extremely favorable notice of the Southern Literary Messenger, claiming that under his editorship it had enjoyed “a success quite unparalleled in the history of our five dollar Magazines.” The Messenger’s subscribers, Poe continued, “are almost without exception the élite, both as regards wealth and intellectual culture, of the Southern aristocracy, and its corps of contributors are generally men who control the public opinion of the Southerners on all topics.”62 Poe’s 1845 notice raised doubts about the political neutrality of both the Messenger and the Broadway Journal. It also aroused the anger of antislavery activists, who were disturbed to see such a notice in a paper that was supposedly friendly to their cause. Writing for the Liberator, Robert Carter responded with a full-scale attack. According to Carter, many other reformers had hoped that the Broadway Journal would support “the cause of Human Rights” by “properly rebuking evil and evil-doers.” Instead, Carter complained, the Broadway Journal had entered into an unholy alliance with a Southern magazine whose “principles are of the vilest sort” and whose aims are “to uphold the peculiar institution, to decry the colored race,” and “to libel the abolitionists.”63 Carter was under the mistaken impression that the notice of the Messenger had been written by coeditor Charles Briggs, so Poe escaped from the incident relatively unscathed. Briggs’s reaction, however, reveals much about the predicament of a magazine attempting to circulate among subscribers with diverse and conflicting views toward slavery. Briggs claimed to be “unqualifiedly opposed to slavery in every shape,”64 but despite constant prodding from his friend James Russell Lowell, he was unwilling to turn the Broadway Journal into an abolitionist paper. If the paper were to espouse such a position openly, reasoned Briggs, it would lose the very readers most in need of reform: In the little time that our Journal has been going, we have received considerable countenance from the south and yesterday a postmaster in the interior of North Carolina wrote to solicit an agency. Now we should turn the whole people south of the Potomac from us if in our first number we were to make too strong a demonstration against them; and all my hopes of doing good by stealth would be frustrated.65

Briggs, however, had other motives. When Lowell pressed him to take a more daring stand, Briggs invoked financial necessity: “You know that publishers and printers judge of propriety by profit . . . and my publisher and printer took alarm at the outset at my manifest leaning toward certain horrifying because unprofitable doctrines.” After Carter’s attack appeared in the Liberator,

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Briggs stated the case more bluntly: “I cannot afford to publish a radical reform paper, for I could get no readers if I did.”66 The lesson in political neutrality first given at the Messenger was therefore repeated at the Broadway Journal, and Poe seems to have learned his lesson well. With the exception of the laudatory notice of the Messenger, Poe was as willing as Briggs to measure “propriety by profit.” He did mount a controversial attack against Longfellow’s supposed plagiarisms,67 but he tended to shun divisive political issues. He showed great reserve, for example, in his account of David Lee Child’s allegory against annexation, The Taking of Naboth’s Vineyard. “The name of the author of this pamphlet,” says Poe, “will remove all doubt as the meaning of Naboth’s Vineyard. Every body will understand that Naboth is Mexico, and the Vineyard Texas.”68 Poe demonstrated a similar circumspection in his notice of James H. Hammond’s Two Letters on Slavery in the United States. Declining even to write a complete sentence, Poe tersely describes this key proslavery document as “A nervously written pamphlet, the design of which is to show that slavery is an inevitable condition of human society.”69 After this period, Poe made only two conspicuous statements about slavery, and unfortunately the context of these statements has been universally neglected. The references to slavery appear in reviews of Longfellow and Lowell, but in each case Poe made the remarks anonymously, or under cover of what we would today call plausible deniability. The first statement occurs in an unsigned review of Longfellow published in the April 1845 Aristidean, just one month after the attack of the Liberator. The review begins by disparaging Longfellow’s Boston supporters, a group identified as “the small coterie of abolitionists, transcendentalists, and fanatics in general,” or more pointedly as “the knot of rogues and madmen” (ER, 760). Then commences an attack on Longfellow’s latest poetic works. Referring specifically to Poems on Slavery, the reviewer accuses Longfellow of pandering to “those negrophilic old ladies of the north” with “a shameless medley of the grossest misrepresentation.” Noting how easily a Northern professor can “write verses instructing the southerners how to give up their all with a good grace,” the reviewer charges that Longfellow has confused slavery in the South with the treatment of slaves in Cuba. Longfellow, the reviewer continues, has “no right to change the locality, and by insinuating a falsehood in lieu of a fact, charge his countrymen with barbarity” (ER, 762, 763). In an apparent attempt to do “evil by stealth,” the anonymous writer turns Briggs’s strategy on its head. This review, however, must be used with caution, for it is evidently a collaborative production by Poe and Thomas Dunn English, editor of the Aristidean. Most passages seem to come directly from Poe, but there are enough inconsistencies to indicate the work of a second author. In all likelihood, Poe provided a rough draft, which English altered to suit his own designs.70 This arrangement apparently satisfied both parties, for Poe


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wanted the piece to look as if it had been written by another hand. The Longfellow review contains many third-person references to “Mr. Poe,” and in a subsequent notice of the Aristidean, Poe with some impudence attempts to maintain this illusion: Some of the papers are exceedingly good—precisely what Magazine papers should be—vigorous, terse, and independent. . . . There is a long review or rather running commentary on Longfellow’s poems. It is, perhaps, a little coarse, but we are not disposed to call it unjust; although there are in it some opinions which, by implication, are attributed to ourselves individually, and with which we cannot altogether coincide.71

It is therefore difficult to decide whether to blame Poe or English for such phrases as “negrophilic old ladies of the north.”72 But two points are clear. First, the defense of the South is presented as a reaction to a Northern attack, specifically an attack by a Boston gentleman who could—without financial risk—turn poetry into a vehicle for political criticism. Second, whether or not Poe “coincided” with the Aristidean review, he certainly recognized that it might arouse some outcry, and he accordingly sought to distance himself from any “horrifying because unprofitable doctrines.” Poe repeated this strategy in his 1849 attack on James Russell Lowell’s A Fable for Critics. In a review written expressly for the Southern Literary Messenger, Poe denounces Lowell as “one of the most rabid of the Abolition fanatics.” Posing as a guardian of Southern sensibility, he attempts to shield prospective readers from Lowell’s “prejudices on the topic of slavery.” “No Southerner,” Poe warns, “who does not wish to be insulted, and at the same time revolted by a bigotry the most obstinately blind and deaf, should ever touch a volume by this author” (ER, 819). As with the Longfellow review, Poe intended this to be anonymous. On several occasions, the writer refers to “Mr. Poe” in the third person, and in his private correspondence, Poe stresses that he had the review published “editorially” (Letters, 2:449). For the first time in years, then, Poe was in a position to write anonymously for a Southern audience. But instead of unleashing a pent-up defense of slavery, Poe uses the opportunity to discuss the perils of fanaticism in general: “His fanaticism about slavery is a mere local outbreak of the same innate wrong-headedness which, if he owned slaves, would manifest itself in atrocious ill-treatment of them, with murder of any abolitionist who should endeavor to set them free. A fanatic of Mr. L’s species, is simply a fanatic for the sake of fanaticism, and must be a fanatic in whatever circumstances you place him.” In other words, fanaticism is a national problem which merely expresses itself differently in different regions. But as indicated in the succeeding paragraph, what most disturbs Poe is the power of fanaticism to aggravate the cultural division between North and South, for this effectively deprives Southern writers of access to the national literary market:

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“It is a fashion among Mr. Lowell’s set to affect a belief that there is no such thing as Southern Literature. Northerners—people who have really nothing to speak of as men of letters,—are cited by the dozen . . . Other writers are barbarians and are satirized accordingly—if mentioned at all” (ER, 819–20). Even when writing anonymously, Poe found it easier to denounce abolitionism than to justify slavery, and when he did defend the South, he showed greater concern for Southern writers than for Southern institutions. There are other stray references to race, ranging from a comment on African-American speech in his review of Sedgwick’s The Linwoods to a matter-offact description of a slave uprising in his review of Bird’s Sheppard Lee.73 But given the vast bulk of his writings, these references are conspicuously few. Unable and unwilling to bear the risks of political speech, Poe succumbed to the pressures of a national literary market either by falling silent on controversial issues, or by searching for an average racism that could take the place of unprofitable doctrines about slavery. There were of course writers who rejected this strategy and profited nevertheless, but as G. R. Thompson has pointed out, Poe generally shied away from the literary sectionalism of such writers as Simms, Longfellow, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.74 Of Poe’s sixty-five tales, only two—“The Gold-Bug” and “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains”—are set in the South, and many of the rest seem to be set nowhere at all. Thompson attributes this antiregional stance to Poe’s professionalism, but it should be noted that professional calculations are not necessarily honorable or just. For Poe, admission to the national literary market meant turning his back on the momentous political and social struggles of the day, except when such struggles impinged directly upon the material interests of a commercial writer. So if there is little cause to denounce Poe for his statements on slavery, there is likewise no reason to praise him for his professional silence. Patriotism may be the last refuge of scoundrels, but professionalism is oftentimes the first.

IV. CONCLUSION: THE WAGES OF NATIONALISM All of this suggests that Poe, far from being “the most blatant racist among the American romantics,” was arguably among the most discreet. Illuminating in this regard is the case of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Following what is now a familiar pattern, one critic has recently attempted to “unmask” Emerson’s racism by assembling an extremely partial and incriminating selection of his journal entries.75 In 1822, for example, Emerson reported that he saw “a hundred large lipped, lowbrowed black men who, except in the mere matter of languages, did not exceed the sagacity of the elephant.” Emerson also described blacks as being “preAdamite” and marked for extinction: “It is plain that so inferior a race must perish shortly.” In 1848 Emerson even wrote that “It is better to hold the negro race an inch under water than an inch over.”76


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These journal entries are more blatantly racist than anything in Poe’s private correspondence or anonymous reviews. And yet, such a collection of quotations should not be taken as proof that Emerson was more “racist” than Poe. The kind of selective citation used to denounce Emerson and even Lydia Maria Child as racists, I would argue, crosses the boundary from political criticism into sheer character assassination. Critical approaches based on character assassination, or on any ahistorical diagnosis of racism, may possess some marginal pedagogical and heuristic value, but these approaches also project current stalemates into both the past and the future. In other words, the fervent hunt for some blatant racist utterance reveals less about antebellum literature than about the contemporary practice of endlessly unmasking racism as a scandal, as an unsurpassable and perversely cathartic spectacle. To those in search of spectacle, Poe’s reticence is especially frustrating because unlike Emerson, he left no incriminating private manuscripts. Curiously, Poe’s most virulent pronouncements on race are contained in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, a book more or less consciously written for a national audience. The book was published by the New York firm of Harper & Brothers in 1838. Two years prior to publication, James Kirke Paulding had quietly urged Poe to “lower himself a little to the ordinary comprehension of the generality of readers.” In another letter, Harper & Brothers advised Poe that “Readers in this country have a decided and strong preference for works (especially fiction) in which a single and connected story occupies the whole volume.”77 In response to this advice about the national literary market, Poe composed what would be his only novel; at the end of this novel, Poe describes the black natives of Tsalal as “the most wicked, hypocritical, vindictive, bloodthirsty, and altogether fiendish race of men upon the face of the globe” (PT, 1174). Modern critics have pointed to the political implications of this, but in the rush to denounce Poe’s racism, the peculiar formal and historical determinants of Pym have been obscured. First, Poe clearly borrowed from widely circulated travel narratives of Africa and the South Seas, many of which contain similar denunciations of the ignorance and backwardness of “barbarous” nonwestern peoples, including the dark-skinned aborigines of Australia, New Zealand, and Tasmania. Second, the natives on Tsalal take on an allegorical quality because of their extreme blackness, a blackness that includes not only the eyes and teeth of the natives, but much of the natural environment as well. As the fictitious “editor” emphasizes, “Nothing white was to be found at Tsalal, and nothing otherwise in the subsequent voyage to the region beyond” (PT, 1182). Third, there is no obvious link between this racist representation and a specific position on slavery, especially since abolitionists and colonizationists were themselves prone to accept and repeat racist stereotypes.78 These points are crucial to understanding why Poe, whose personal and editorial writings seem relatively muted on the issue of slavery, should make what now appears as his most blatant statement in the most public—and the

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most national—forum he could find. At the Messenger, Poe had learned to avoid controversial political issues, especially those issues likely to elicit complaints from Southern readers. When composing a novel for a New York publisher and a national audience, Poe would have paid even closer attention to divisive issues, and if Pym had contained “horrifying because unprofitable doctrines,” the Capital Reader at Harper’s would undoubtedly have objected. The lurid description of Tsalal therefore demonstrates the difference between a racist representation—especially one conforming to the orders of average racism—and a statement calling for a specific action on slavery. But this is only part of the story. As suggested at the start of this chapter, average racism arose less from an essential American bigotry than from the historically specific conjunction of an emerging national culture and an emerging national market. In this regard the example of Poe is particularly revealing, for his attempt to construct or exploit an average racism was in many ways a deliberate strategy designed to unify sections divided by slavery. Antebellum nationalism, far from being a simple expression of solidarity, should instead be seen as a product of the growing antagonism between North and South, and Poe’s literary nationalism should likewise be understood as an attempt to escape from the realm of unprofitable political strife into the more lucrative neutral territory of mass culture. Poe’s wariness toward slavery is further demonstrated by “A Predicament” and “The Gold-Bug,” the only tales containing extensive depictions of African Americans. In “A Predicament,” the companion piece to “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” Poe parodies the affection between black servant and white mistress in order to disparage both characters. In lines that would have made Beverley Tucker blanche, Psyche Zenobia moves from the sentimental to the ridiculous: And Pompey, my negro!—sweet Pompey! how shall I ever forget thee? I had taken Pompey’s arm. He was three feet in height (I like to be particular) and about seventy, or perhaps eighty, years of age. He had bow-legs and was corpulent. His mouth should not be called small, nor his ears short. His teeth, however, were like pearl, and his large full eyes were deliciously white. Nature had endowed him with no neck, and had placed his ankles (as usual with that race) in the middle of the upper portion of the feet.

By combining stereotypical attributes with more absurd qualities, Zenobia impugns not only Pompey, but also her own literary talents and womanly sentiments. Curiously, Poe seems to imply that her deficiencies in both these areas arise because she is insufficiently racist. Instead of arousing revulsion or distaste, the catalog of Pompey’s attributes provokes an outpouring of passion: “I though of myself, then of Pompey, and then of the mysterious and inexplicable destiny which surrounded us. I thought of Pompey!—alas, I thought of love!” Zenobia begins her description of Pompey by claiming that she “likes to


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be particular,” but by the end of the passage her claim seems scandalously ironic: however particular in her descriptions, she is none too particular in her passions. Zenobia’s affection for Pompey, to be sure, is not what Beverley Tucker had in mind when he alluded to those exalted feelings by which “the heart is made better” (Paulding-Drayton review, 338). Indeed, when Zenobia and Pompey later fall and tumble together on the floor, one can imagine Tucker’s mortification—until he recalled that Psyche Zenobia was not a Southern Lady but only a Philadelphia authoress, and that Pompey was not a Southern slave but only a Northern servant. Upon realizing this, he perhaps would have found some humor in “A Predicament” and laughed along with his Northern counterparts at the absurdity of Zenobia’s quest to write “a genuine Blackwood article of the sensation stamp” (PT, 281). Significantly, this laughter would have been fueled not only by racism, but also by sexism, nationalism, and cultural elitism (Blackwood’s was a popular Scottish literary magazine which sold well in England and the United States). In “The Gold-Bug,” Poe shifts the scene to South Carolina. Once again there is something vaguely comical about the master-servant relationship, although in this case there is no question of improper affections, at least not on the part of Legrand. The black servant Jupiter, however, seems to embody “the staunch loyalty and heart-felt devotion” celebrated by Beverley Tucker (Partisan Leader, 142). Aside from his extreme devotion to Legrand, Jupiter’s speech is apparently intended to represent a black dialect influenced by Gullah, a creole spoken by blacks on the coastal islands of South Carolina and Georgia.79 Indeed, in his review of Sedgwick’s The Linwoods, Poe objects to “the discrepancy between the words and the character of the speaker,” particularly in cases where the character is black. After quoting a rousing speech by an AfricanAmerican character named Rose, Poe asks, “Who would suppose this graceful eloquence to proceed from the mouth of a negro woman?” (ER, 1203). Poe evidently sought to correct this alleged discrepancy in “The Gold-Bug,” and in his unsigned review of himself, he in fact singles out the “accurate” depiction of Jupiter: The characters are well-drawn. The reflective qualities and steady purpose, founded on a laboriously obtained conviction of Legrand, is most faithfully depicted. The negro is a perfect picture. He is drawn accurately—no feature overshaded, or distorted. Most of such delineations are caricatures. (ER, 869)

In what sense is Jupiter a “perfect picture”? Presumably, Poe is referring to his dialect, his superstition, and perhaps his inability to tell right from left. In addition, Jupiter is “obstinate” and physically strong—at one point he even considers beating Legrand with a stick to cure his gold fever. But as indicated already, Jupiter’s most important trait is his loyalty to Legrand. Significantly, this loyalty determines the narrator’s response to Legrand’s apparent madness: “Could I have depended, indeed, upon Jupiter’s aid, I would have had no

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hesitation in attempting to get the lunatic home by force; but I was too well assured of the old negro’s disposition, to hope that he would assist me, under any circumstances, in a personal contest with his master” (PT, 575). Taken in isolation, such behavior seems derived from plantation narratives, and some critics have accordingly described Jupiter as a “black slave.”80 But as Poe carefully specifies at the beginning of the story, Jupiter is actually free: [Legrand] was usually accompanied by an old negro, called Jupiter, who had been manumitted before the reverses of the family, but who could be induced, by neither threats nor promises, to abandon what he considered his right of attendance upon the footsteps of his young “Massa Will.” It is not improbable that the relatives of Legrand, conceiving him to be somewhat unsettled in intellect, had contrived to instil this obstinacy into Jupiter, with a view to the supervision and guardianship of the wanderer. (PT, 561)

Recognizing the political divisions in the national audience, Poe shrewdly tries to have it both ways. On the one hand, he exploits conventions about the intimate, loyal bonds between white masters and black servants. On the other hand, he attempts to evade any outcry over such a portrayal by making Jupiter free, and although Legrand is referred to as “master” on several occasions, never once in the entire story does Poe use the word “slave.” In other words, Poe capitalizes on the average racism of his audience while neutralizing the sectional conflict over slavery. Through a crucial yet subtle change in Jupiter’s legal status, Poe attempted to create a sanitized South that could circulate freely in the national literary market. Obviously, such a strategy could extend beyond U.S. boundaries to the world at large. In his remarks on literary nationalism, Poe accordingly disparages not only the political determinants of culture, but even the demand for uniquely American themes and settings: Much has been said, of late, about the necessity of maintaining a proper nationality in American Letters; but what this nationality is, or what is to be gained by it, has never been distinctly understood. That an American should confine himself to American themes, or even prefer them, is rather a political than a literary idea—and at best is a questionable point. We would do well to bear in mind that “distance lends enchantment to the view.” Ceteris paribus, a foreign theme is, in a strictly literary sense, to be preferred. After all, the world at large is the only legitimate stage for the autorial histrio. (ER, 1076)

Immediately after using this Shakespearean allusion to make exalted claims about authorship, Poe returns to the crucial practical function of literary nationalism: “But of the need of that nationality which defends our own literature, sustains our own men of letters, upholds our own dignity, and depends upon our own resources, there cannot be the shadow of a doubt” (ER, 1076). The phrase about upholding American dignity seems to have been thrown in


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for good measure; Poe’s real argument is that given the absence of international copyright protection, American authors have a material or economic dependence upon a nationalist ideology. This explains why, in the prospectus for Penn Magazine, Poe promises to “support the general interests of the republic of letters, without reference to particular regions” (ER, 1025). Importantly, this advocacy of literary nationalism put Poe into direct conflict with the cultural politics of Thomas Dew. In an address published in the March 1836 Messenger, Dew discusses the conditions that would allow the United States to “rear up and sustain a mere literary class,” that is, a class of full-time, professional authors.81 As a political economist, Dew emphasizes the importance of transportation networks, libraries, technological improvements, urbanization, and the growth of a large population knit together by common manners and a common language. But Dew also worries that in a single homogeneous literary market, “certain standard authors establish their dominion,” which means that a small number of (Northern) authors monopolize the fame—and the funds—that could otherwise sustain a larger literary class (267). Given Dew’s advocacy of state’s rights, it is no surprise that he should recommend a system of cultural decentralization to reduce “the withering and blighting influence of great names.” Under such a system, Dew maintains, “there is a wholesome circulation of literature from one state to another, without establishing, however, anything like a dictatorship in the republic of letters” (268). The proper literary “theatre”—a word Dew uses repeatedly—is therefore not the world at large but instead a writer’s particular state or section. As Dew himself recognizes, this position directly conflicts with the ideology of literary nationalism: In such a system . . . there is no national prejudice fostered in a national literature; respect, and even veneration, will be paid in such a system to all true learning, wherever it may be found; but there will be no worship, no abject submission to literary dictators. And if such a people may fail to form a regular homogeneous national literature, they will perhaps for that very reason be enabled to carry each art and science, in the end, to a higher pitch of perfection than it could reach if trammelled by the binding laws imposed by an organized national literature. (268)

Poe did attack the cultural hegemony of New England, and he frequently defended the merits of Southern authors, but as an editor and commercial writer always on the lookout for subscribers, he was unwilling to restrict his labors to a single state or region. Having beheld the tantalizing prospect of a national literary market, Poe could not be tempted to commit any unprofitable acts of sectional partisanship. At the end of his life, Poe made one last statement about blackness which underscores how ideological and economic forces combined to determine the salability of racism. In a 26 June 1849 letter to George Eveleth, Poe discusses

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Eureka (recently published) and his still unfulfilled plans for the Stylus. In the course of the letter, Poe also mentions the review in which he chastises Lowell for being an “Abolition fanatic” and for treating writers outside of Boston— especially Southern writers—as “barbarians” (ER, 820). This induced Poe to recall a “Monk” Lewis anecdote that he must have read about years earlier.82 Lewis’s play The Castle Spectre was first performed in 1797; though popular, the play was criticized for its fantastic elements, including the presence of black servants in a Welsh castle. In the published version of the play, Lewis justified his audacity: That Osmond is attended by Negroes is an anachronism, I allow; but . . . I by no means repent the introduction of my Africans: I thought it would give a pleasing variety to the characters and dresses, if I made my servants black; and could I have produced the same effect by making my heroine blue, blue I should have made her.83

In Poe’s version, there are some revealing distortions: Monk Lewis once was asked how he came, in one of his acted plays, to introduce black banditti, when, in the country where the scene was laid, black people were quite unknown. His answer was: “I introduced them because I truly anticipated that blacks would have more effect on my audience than whites—and if I had taken it into my head that, by making them sky-blue, the effect would have been greater, why sky-blue they should have been.” To apply this idea to “The Stylus”—I am awaiting the best opportunity for its issue. . . (Letters, 2:449–50)

How should we account for Poe’s revisionary memory? Do the changes comprise a sort of racist slip that reveals his true sentiments? Or do the changes reflect an appreciation of Lewis’s willingness to exploit the shock-value, or salability, of racial difference? The letter, after all, discusses plans to arouse interest in a new magazine project, and although Poe’s claim about deliberately postponing the Stylus is dubious, he did place great emphasis on the conscious and sometimes manipulative creation of a specific effect—not only within a literary text, but also within an entire literary market. The distortions or slips in his recollection could therefore be attributed to an ongoing negotiation between racist ideologies and the pressures of a mass publishing industry. As a commercial writer, Poe had to produce a text that could transcend competing ideologies of racial difference—one might call them dueling racisms— in order achieve a uniform literary effect among a divided national audience.84 Unlike “horrifying because unprofitable doctrines” about slavery per se, however, representations of racial difference—whether sentimental or sensational—remained viable in all segments of the American market. For this reason, racism exerted an economic influence over both literary and commercial calculations, and it also encouraged the kind of distortions manifested in the misquotation of Monk Lewis. Poe accordingly omits the blue heroine, substi-


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tutes a single “effect” for a “pleasing variety,” and, in his most revealing distortion, transforms the black “servants” into “black banditti.” As recounted in the next chapter, the transformation of servants into bandits precisely duplicates the events in Pym, where seemingly friendly natives turn into murderous black savages. Poe’s calculating approach to the mass literary market complicates the political meaning of Pym and his other fictional writings. Based upon what we know of these calculations, it is misguided to conceive of his racism as an attitude or sentiment somehow separable from the constraints and pressures of the prevailing modes of production, especially in a nation that suffered antagonistic modes to coexist until the advent of civil war. By extension, it is misguided to conceive of literary production as occurring in some fantastic realm of freedom apart from the ideological and material forces that characterize a social formation. If nothing else, the recognition of these forces makes it possible to move beyond interpretations that are informed by hindsight but not by history. For example, the paucity of comments about race in Poe’s private correspondence, along with the offhanded disparagement of abolitionist poets in his anonymous critical reviews, should cast doubt on interpretations of the final chapters of Pym as divine retribution for “the known offense of slavery” (Dayan, “Romance and Race,” 109). I must also question Dayan’s claim that “Poe remained haunted, as did Jefferson, by the terrible disjunction between the ideology of slavery . . . and the concrete realities of mutilation, torture, and violation” (102). If anything, Poe seems to have conjured up the haunting portrait of blackness as a means of appealing to multiple segments of the white literary audience. And as soon as the audience is described in these terms, it becomes clear that his racist representations have less to do with black-white relations than with the way white people relate to each other. The way white people relate to each other: this is what haunts Poe, this is what motivates his fantasies of a neutral culture, and this, to an extent seldom acknowledged, is what burdens the current critical discourse on race. What matters about Poe is not so much his reticence on slavery, nor even his use of racist stereotypes—which are as infrequent as they are offhanded. Instead, the case of Poe matters because his utterances and silences were both part of a coherent strategy to expel politics from the literary commodity. This is why attempts to read politics back into Poe’s work have proven so vexing. To make this task easier, critics still turn to the Paulding-Drayton review as the smoking gun that will convict Poe once and for all. When this doesn’t succeed, blame is sometimes placed upon conspiratorial Poe scholars, who are seen as withholding or covering up incriminating evidence.85 This chapter is not designed to comfort the vexed, but I do hope that I have demonstrated two things: First, although Poe left behind a clear trail of what might be called circumstantial racism, he avoided—by habit and design—the kind of political speech practiced by fire-breathing secessionists like Beverley Tucker and by antislavery

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moralists like James E. Heath (both of whom Poe knew during his connection with the Southern Literary Messenger). From this follows the second point, namely that the “depoliticized” Poe is only partly the work of his interpreters. Observing the dictates of the “cash rule,” Poe sometimes played to the average racism of the national audience, but more frequently he avoided altogether those “horrifying because unprofitable doctrines” about slavery. In other words, Poe’s work was not simply depoliticized by modern critics; it was in many ways depoliticized from the start. This, I would suggest, must be the basis for all future political criticism of Poe. Paradoxically, this insight also justifies the ideological interpretations of Poe that I have been attacking throughout this chapter. Though there may be flaws in the evidence and assumptions of critics such as Rosenthal, Nelson, and Rowe, the case of Poe nevertheless demonstrates the importance of race in determining what literature is—the form and meaning of its sentences, the form and meaning of its silences. Taken in context, the example of Poe reveals the error of viewing racism as a private demon to be exorcised through simple denunciation, or as a Southern disease to be eradicated through a liberal dose of enlightenment. All too frequently, such views lead to the creation of an interpretive procedure that merely diagnoses texts as being racism-positive or racism-negative. When the texts themselves resist such a diagnosis, critics sometimes resort to ad hominem arguments, which resolve textual ambiguity by invoking the alleged beliefs of the alleged author.86 Given the divergent political agendas of such writers as Tucker, Emerson, and even Lydia Maria Child, it is at least necessary to consider the motives and pressures determining their respective representations of race. And given the peculiar circumstances surrounding Poe, it is also worthwhile to recall that the relation between literature and politics is itself historically determined—so much so that a strategy originally designed to avoid controversy now provokes it. To resolve the current tangle of error and simplification, it is necessary to step back from the purity of ahistorical criticism and to delve into the complexities of a painful and uncompleted past. In the case of Poe and other antebellum writers, such an approach reveals a world of Orwellian complicity far beyond the explanatory reach of praise and denunciation. In that world—and perhaps in our own—all racisms are equal, but some racisms are more equal than others.

Chapter Six SUBTLE BARBARIANS THE SOUTHERN VOYAGE OF EDGAR ALLAN POE Commerce has constantly increased with the knowledge of man; yet it has been undergoing perpetual revolutions. These changes and revolutions have often mocked the vigilance of the wary, and the calculations of the sagacious; but there is now a fundamental principle on which commerce is based, which will lead the intelligent merchant and the wise government to foresee and prepare for most of these changes; and that principle consists in an intimate knowledge of all seas, climates, islands, continents, of every river and mountain, and every plain of the globe, and all their productions, and of the nature, habits and character of all races of men; and this information should be corrected and revised with every season. ( Jeremiah N. Reynolds, 1828) [The savages] had uniformly behaved with the greatest decorum, aiding us with alacrity in our work, offering us their commodities frequently without price, and never, in any instance, pilfering a single article . . . A very short while sufficed to prove that this apparent kindness of disposition was only the result of a deeply laid plan for our destruction, and that the islanders for whom we had entertained such inordinate feelings of esteem, were among the most barbarous, subtle, and bloodthirsty wretches that ever contaminated the face of the globe. (Poe, 1838) It is a fashion among Mr. Lowell’s set to affect a belief that there is no such thing as Southern Literature. Northerners—people who have really nothing to speak of as men of letters—are cited by the dozen. . . . Other writers are barbarians and satirized accordingly—if mentioned at all. (Poe, 1849)

N

EAR THE END of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, the British schooner Jane Guy drops anchor in the bay of a mysterious antarctic island called Tsalal. The schooner, which earlier had rescued Pym from a shipwrecked whaler, is on a commercial voyage “to cruise the South Seas for any cargo which might come most readily to hand.”1 The Jane Guy is quickly met by the native inhabitants, who happen to be completely black; as Pym later discovers, there is nothing white on the entire

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island. Venturing ashore, Pym and the traders question the natives “in every ingenious manner we could devise, with a view of discovering what were the chief productions of the country, and whether any of them might be turned to profit” (PT, 1145). They soon strike a bargain, but later the natives ambush the white voyagers and bury them alive beneath tons of earth and rock. Before escaping from Tsalal to continue his southern voyage, Pym bitterly denounces the islanders as “the most barbarous, subtle, and bloodthirsty wretches that ever contaminated the face of the globe” (PT, 1150). Given the commercial purpose of the adventure and the convoluted exposition of events, it is fair to say that the natives are not the only ones schooled in subtlety. Why, for example, does Poe disguise his story as an authentic exploration narrative? Why does he raise high expectations about the commercial and scientific value of the voyage, and then dash these expectations through the treachery of the Tsalal natives and the suspicious “disappearance” of the final portions of the manuscript? And what significance—political, religious, or otherwise—are we to deduce from the talismanic quality of whiteness at the end of the novel? As mentioned in Chapter Five, many interpretations present the Tsalal episode as evidence of Poe’s racism; once this racism has been exposed and denounced, there is often little left to say. Other interpretations avoid race altogether, instead treating Pym as an object lesson in undecidability or absent presence or what has been called “the music of nothingness.” Neither of these approaches provides a satisfactory account of Pym as a whole. For this, it is necessary to engage in a different sort of subtlety and to reconstruct, out of such materials as come most readily to hand, the connection between race and exploration narratives in antebellum America. In pursuing this connection, it shall become apparent that racial discourse can perform its differential function only by positing some larger social unity. Following Fredric Jameson, it might be said that racism relates.2 In antebellum America, for example, apologists for slavery generally sought to demarcate a role for subordinate races within a broader economic, religious, or moral context; and beyond national borders, explorers generally used race as a kind of omnibus category to describe unfamiliar cultures. One aspiring explorer, Jeremiah N. Reynolds, is especially crucial to our present investigation. Reynolds, part huckster, part visionary, part Congressional lobbyist, had once championed the theory of Captain John Symmes concerning vast polar openings to the hollow center of the earth. By 1836, a more seasoned Reynolds had become one of the chief proponents of the South-Sea Surveying and Exploring Expedition. In support of Reynolds’s proposal, Poe published a pair of enthusiastic articles in the Southern Literary Messenger. These articles are important to any interpretation of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, not only because Poe was advocating Reynolds’s expedition while composing a southern voyage of his own but also because Poe lent an air of authenticity to Pym by citing or plundering from Reynolds’s reports and addresses.3 Near the end of Pym, however, Poe undermines both Reynolds’s optimism and the commercial util-

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ity of race as a category of social analysis. On the island of Tsalal, the similarity between deceitful explorer and devious native implies the instability—or perhaps the amalgamation—of racial difference, and what begins as an absolute distinction between black and white ultimately threatens to collapse into a startling identification. Poe facilitates this collapse by devising a politically dysfunctional version of racism. For one thing, the absolute racial antagonism on Tsalal undermines the peaceful hierarchy at the core of Southern paternalism. But the Tsalal episode also violates the conventions of nineteenth-century exploration narratives, narratives which were deeply implicated in the rise of capitalism as a world system and in the creation of a global signifying environment. As indicated in the epigraph from Reynolds, this signifying environment would abhor any deceit that impeded “intimate knowledge” of the world, regardless of whether the deceit were perpetrated by white explorers or black natives. In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe sets sail from a land where capitalists cultivate information, only to run aground on an island where subtlety and barbarism look the same.

I. BEYOND DENUNCIATION AND DECONSTRUCTION As we retrace this journey, it will become increasingly difficult to accept claims about the absence of “jarring incongruities” in Poe’s work.4 By returning to the scene of literary creation, we shall in fact discover an abundance of incongruities, both between Poe’s “art” and “politics” and within each of these realms as well. Many of these incongruities can be attributed to unavoidable historical contradictions—between North and South, between slave and wage labor, between plantation and emerging industrial economies. But some incongruities are inherent in the very design of Pym, for the novel capitalizes on a narrative form that was already serving conflicting economic and ideological functions. To advocates of economic expansion, the exploration narrative provided useful information about western lands, natural resources, trade routes, and foreign markets. To advocates of slavery (not necessarily a separate group), the exploration narrative—especially those by British travelers— provided a wealth of imagery depicting the barbarism of Africa and the degraded conditions of societies ruled by former slaves. And to that statistical approximation Poe called “the merely general reader,” the exploration narrative undoubtedly served as a respectable form of thrilling adventure and exotic escape (ER, 221). In order to grasp the social meaning of Pym, it is therefore necessary to consider not only Poe’s political views, but also the conflicting uses of the exploration narrative itself. This is one of the blank spots in Pym criticism. Discussing ten distinct critical approaches to Pym that have emerged since the 1950s, Douglas Robinson remarks that The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is “the interpreter’s dreamtext. . . . a text ‘solidly’ grounded in an ambiguity of the most radical and

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self-consuming kind, rendering it, in the wakeful eyes of critics hungry to interpret, a textual vacuum begging to be filled with a reading.”5 Aware of how this emptiness might be misused, Derrida has criticized Lacan for turning another Poe text into “exemplary content” by neglecting the formal qualities of the narrative.6 In the case of Pym, political readings would seem most vulnerable to such a charge, but based upon its performance to date, deconstruction has been as prone to transform Pym into an exemplary content as any other interpretive method. In an influential early reading, Tel Quel theorist Jean Ricardou describes Pym as an “allegory of the page” which self-consciously enacts the journey every text must make into an inescapable whiteness.7 For Ricardou, white and black are but metaphorical substitutes for paper and ink, and if the narrative ever “borrows materials from the world,” it is only “for the purpose of denoting itself” (6). John Carlos Rowe similarly detects a “general narrative movement from referential discourse to a system in which signs refer only to other signs.”8 In American Hieroglyphics, John Irwin devotes nearly two hundred pages to indeterminacy, doubling and repetition in Pym. Emphasizing the link between language and the self, Irwin argues that writers such as Poe and Melville believed that “the self as a linguistic entity could never break through some ultimate surface of language to an asymbolic realm, that the cipher was an empty cipher because there existed no supernatural world of pure significance corresponding to the natural world of signs.”9 Such readings seem indifferent to history, and this indifference leads them to ignore Pym’s formal affinities with the exploration narrative, as well as the thematic similarities between the Tsalal episode and antebellum political discourse. Whatever its theoretical potential, deconstruction has in practice exploited the ambiguity in Pym to celebrate the self-reflexivity of language rather than to explore what it might mean, in antebellum America, to represent an ostensibly peaceful black society that is secretly plotting violence, or to compose an exploration narrative which awakens and then repeatedly frustrates the desire for commercially useful information. Political approaches demonstrate a better grasp of Pym’s historical context, but as indicated in Chapter Five, “race” often functions as a reified and preemptory concept that drives out other considerations. It is, in other words, relatively easy to test whether a given text is racism-positive or racism-negative; the challenge is to gather up the traces of an uncompleted past and to create from these materials a political reading that is also critical.

II. THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF EXPLORATION In the case of Pym, the relation between history and literature only becomes clear in light of the multiple political and economic functions performed by travel and exploration narratives in antebellum America. Sometimes, as in the

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case of Harriet Martineau’s Society in America, these narratives were offered as examples of the way the United States was perceived in other countries. Also popular were narratives by American travelers, ranging from countless reports of scientific expeditions to Parkman’s The Oregon Trail to Frederick Law Olmsted’s journeys through the Old South. In this genre too may be included more literary variants by writers like Thoreau (Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers) and Melville (Typee, Omoo, Moby-Dick). Even with these, however, contemporary reviewers insisted on a certain degree of objectivity which, as Carolyn Porter suggests, was measured mainly by “the degree to which [the travel writer] maintained a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ ”10 As shall become clear, the meaning of “us and them” involves not only nationality, but also racial and regional differences linked to a certain mode of domestic production and a complementary program of expansion or imperialism. It is not my purpose here to survey the rich and varied history of travel literature.11 Instead, I would merely call attention to the function that “outside” information was beginning to play in antebellum America. Benjamin Franklin and others, of course, had long insisted that knowledge should have a purpose, and to understand Pym, it is necessary to investigate the cultural and economic purposes of exploration narratives. Obviously, the specialized geographical and agricultural information provided by western travelers would prove indispensable to settlers in search of farm land. Crèvecoeur’s American farmer affords a good illustration: No sooner is he resolved than he takes all the information he can with regard to the country he proposes to inhabit. He finds out all travellers who have been on the spot; he views maps; attentively weighs the benefits and disadvantages. . . . In short the complicated arrangement of a great machine would not do greater honour to the most skilful artist than the reduction and digesting of so many thoughts and calculations by this hitherto obscure man.12

Information took on special value at frontiers, which could be understood as either places (the West, the Antarctic, the moon) or as scientific practices (navigation, geology, astronomy, mesmerism). But as Poe recognized, all of these places and practices were in some way subject to the pressures of capitalist development. Not surprisingly, then, Poe emphasized the political economy of exploration in his first imaginary voyage, “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall.” Before the start of the adventure, Hans Pfaall had enjoyed a successful career as a bellows-mender until political unrest began to interfere with his trade. Due to “liberty, long speeches and radicalism,” his once loyal customers “had as much as they could do to read about the revolutions. . . . [And] if a fire wanted fanning, it could readily be fanned with a newspaper” (PT, 955). Falling deep into debt, Hans constructs a balloon, blows up his creditors with dynamite, and flies to the moon, where he spends five years gathering information on astronomy, aeronautics and the bizarre customs of

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moon-dwellers. Seeking repatriation on earth, Hans offers to exchange this information for full immunity from criminal prosecution. “I must have my reward,” says Hans, “in consideration of the light which I have it in my power to throw upon many important branches of physical and metaphysical science” (PT, 995). In other words, Hans portrays his exploration narrative less as a source of amusement than as a marketable commodity which should bring power and wealth to its owner. Like his main character, Poe did his best to derive maximum profit and publicity from the tale. Among other things, he arranged to have a number of notices inserted in newspapers which were on friendly terms with the Southern Literary Messenger. Later reprinted in the Messenger as impartial, unsolicited evaluations, the notices are important primarily because they reveal how Poe wanted to present his own exploration narratives to the reading public. A representative notice from the Baltimore Republican emphasizes the commercial basis of even imaginary voyages: “Hans Pfaall . . . is a capital burlesque upon balloonings, which have recently been carried to a ridiculous extent, without much prospect of profit to the persons engaged in it, or advantage to the community.” A comment in the Baltimore Gazette similarly describes the tale as “a capital burlesque upon the ballooning mania, which has recently driven a number of our good citizens . . . to seek their fortunes in the unexplored aerial regions.”13 When he discussed actual voyages, Poe was a more sober witness to the commercial utility of transportation and exploration. This is most clearly demonstrated by his support of the United States Exploring Expedition originally proposed by Jeremiah Reynolds. As noted previously, Reynolds had been inspired by Symmes’s theory that the earth was essentially hollow, consisting of spheres nestled within spheres that were open at the poles. The notion of Symmes’s hole, of course, has influenced a number of imaginary voyages, ranging from the pseudonymous Symzonia to Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth to Samuel Delany’s Nova. Reynolds, however, possessed a unique ability to connect scientific fantasy with capitalism’s necessary and relentless curiosity about the global conditions of production, distribution, and exchange. Making his first public appearance in 1825, Reynolds captivated audiences by holding up a model of Symmes’s hollow earth and lecturing on the advantages of “extending the American frontier to the ends of the earth.”14 And although the whole idea seems incredible today, advocates of Symmes’s theory claimed that it was consistent with “divine economy.” This, at least, is the argument of Symmes’s Theory of Concentric Spheres, the book that Reynolds distributed during his lecture tour: And I cannot discover in this any thing derogatory from His infinite power, wisdom, or divine economy, in the formation of a hollow world and concentric spheres, any more than in that of solid ones. I should rather be of opinion, that a construction of

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all the orbs in creation, on a plan corresponding with Symmes’s theory, would display the highest possible degree of perfection, wisdom, and goodness—the most perfect system of creative economy—and, (as Dr. Mitchell expresses it) a great saving of stuff.15

By making such arguments, Reynolds apparently succeeded in winning a modicum of support from the public and the press. In the late 1820s, several newspapers lobbied for the expedition and criticized the federal government for “sitting back in republican lethargy while the ships of England, France, and Russia were crashing through the ice flows in the race for empire” (Almy, “J. N. Reynolds,” 235). But although appeals to the imagination and to divine economy won some converts, Symmes’s theory was not generally treated as a credible scientific hypothesis. In the preface to Symmes’s Theory of Concentric Spheres, the author in fact complains of being received with “sarcasm,” “ridicule,” and “an air of levity very unfavourable to serious investigation” (v). During the next ten years, Reynolds accordingly sought to refashion himself into a more respectable advocate of expeditionary voyages, partly by saying less about Symmes and more about the political and economic benefits of exploration. In his 1836 address before the U.S. Congress, for example, Reynolds combined science, trade, and imperialism into a more systematic program for accumulating information about the world. One of the first to view information as an economic good, he argued that recent advances in agricultural and industrial production had been “wrought up by a capital of intelligence and enterprize.”16 Pointing to the role of government in encouraging commercial development, Reynolds claimed it was a matter of national shame for the United States “to use, forever, the knowledge furnished by others . . . and add nothing to the great mass of information that previous ages and other nations have brought to our hands” (ER, 1232). Pressure from Reynolds, the press, and the whaling industry finally persuaded Congress and the Jackson administration to support the project. On 14 May 1836, the House of Representatives appropriated three hundred thousand dollars to finance a “Surveying and Exploring Expedition to the Pacific Ocean and the South Seas.” In all likelihood, Poe knew about Reynolds in both incarnations, that is, as both the hollow-earth visionary of the 1820s and the development-oriented lobbyist of the 1830s. The contemporary press certainly preserved these two aspects of Reynolds’s career. In the 1835 Southern Literary Messenger, for example, a reviewer casually recounts Reynolds’s past: “Mr. Reynolds . . . will be remembered as the associate of Symmes in his remarkable theory of the earth, and a public defender of that very indefensible subject, upon which he delivered a series of lectures in many of our principal cities.”17 By all indications, Poe did not bemoan the transformation from visionary to lobbyist; in his reviews for the Messenger, he in fact seemed eager to imitate Reynolds’s

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expansive commercial discourse. Perhaps this should come as no surprise. Having been raised in the household of a Scottish dry-goods merchant and tobacco exporter, Poe was not only steeped in the concepts of political economy but also accustomed to viewing the world as a market for U.S. agricultural and industrial commodities. In his correspondence he frequently referred to intrinsic and exchange value, magazine circulation and sales, the law of supply and demand, and the loathsome dominance of capital over literary labor.18 When it came to supporting Reynolds in his quest for federal financing, Poe therefore knew what chords to strike. Describing the South Pacific as “a vast field for national enterprise” (ER, 1229), Poe argues that investment in the expeditionary voyage would benefit both commerce and science. In arguing for the latter, however, Poe depicts science as a form of social capital that could augment both national pride and private profit: It is our duty, holding as we do a high rank in the scale of nations, to contribute a large share to that aggregate of useful knowledge, which is the common property of all. . . . In building up the fabric of our commercial prosperity, let us not filch at the corner stone. Let it not be said of us, in future ages, that we ingloriously availed ourselves of a stock of scientific knowledge, to which we had not contributed our quota. (ER, 1231–32)

In other words, both Poe and Reynolds argued that the voyage would yield “a capital of intelligence” in the form of knowledge about antarctic geography, navigation, southern fisheries, trade routes, and foreign markets. When explorers in general and Pym in particular claimed that their narratives were true, they did not mean that they possessed some ultimate, transcendental knowledge of nature and God. Instead, they were claiming that their narratives contained profitable information, which for our purposes may be defined as the form taken by capital in the signifying environment. This definition reveals some of the social complexity of Pym, enabling us to explore the antagonistic relation between a literary form like the imaginary voyage and a capital form like information, which in turn allows us to grasp the depth of Poe’s confrontation with the ensemble of material pressures exerted by capitalism over literary production. It would be impossible to undertake a full exploration of this confrontation here, but before moving on to consider the importance of race and capital in Poe’s southern voyage, two further points should be noted about the emergence of information as a dominant form of meaning. First, Poe knew that even literary writers had been “forced upon the curt, the condensed, the well-digested in place of the voluminous.” According to him, this change resulted from “a vast increase in the thinking material” which compelled writers “to put the greatest amount of thought in the smallest compass and disperse it with the utmost attainable rapidity” (ER, 1377). Second, those in charge of appropriating funds for exploring expeditions understood the contradiction between imaginative forms

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of travel writing and forms of signification that could reenter the process of production and thereby valorize capital. Speaking in favor of the U. S. Exploring Expedition, Rep. Thomas Hamer (D-OH) carefully distinguished between adventure and capitalist exploration: [The expedition] had been pronounced a visionary project, and one gentleman had compared it to an expedition to the moon. He was surprised to hear gentlemen indulge in the use of such language. The gentleman surely had misapprehended the meaning of the term “exploration,” as used upon this occasion. The expedition, so far from being visionary, was one of the most practical kind that could well be imagined. It was sent out, not so much to discover new islands and continents, as to explore and examine those which were already known. It was, in a great measure, to collect information, and embody it in such a form, as would enable our hardy and enterprising countrymen to navigate those seas, and to prosecute their labours in safety.19

When companies and governments financed exploration, they demanded not only that the expedition return with truthful—i.e., profitable—information, they also required that the information be embodied in a form that would allow it to serve as an instrument of production. In such a signifying environment, a hoax or perversion of the exploration narrative could also be seen as a perversion of the prevailing economic order, just as a refusal to provide useful information could be taken as an affront to capitalism itself. We have come a long way, then, from Crèvecoeur’s farmer. As indicated by the more costly expeditions, exploration was designed to assist not only the calculations of solitary pioneers, but also the grander reckoning of states in search of land, markets, and natural resources. Even such Enlightenment enthusiasts as Thomas Jefferson understood the strategic and economic importance of the information contained in exploration narratives. In 1783, for example, Jefferson worried about a British plan to explore the territory west of the Mississippi. “They pretend it is only to promote knowledge,” he confided to George Clark, “[but] I am afraid they have thoughts of colonizing into that quarter.”20 When Jefferson later sent Lewis and Clark to explore the same territory, he too had thoughts of colonizing the West. In a remarkably precise and detailed letter, Jefferson told Meriwether Lewis that “the commerce which may be carried on with the people inhabiting the line you will pursue, renders a knowledge of these people important.”21 He further advised Lewis to avoid engaging in a battle with a superior Indian force because “In the loss of yourselves, we should lose also the information you will have acquired” (Writings, 1130). Jefferson’s call for a profitable travelogue was duly noted by editors like Poe and explorers like Jeremiah Reynolds when they lobbied for a scientific voyage to the South Pole. In an address to Congress that Poe cited, Reynolds said that Jefferson’s letter to Lewis was second in importance only to the Declaration of Independence, and that it could serve, with slight variations, as a model for his own proposed expedition to the South Seas.22

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But although Reynolds was eager to identify himself with Jefferson, Poe seemed curiously ambivalent toward the founding father of exploring expeditions and toward the economic function that such expeditions were designed to fulfill. This is especially apparent in Poe’s imaginary voyages. In the unfinished Journal of Julius Rodman, for example, Poe takes great delight in upstaging the Lewis and Clark expedition that Jefferson had ordered. According to the “editorial” commentary on the Journal, the Rodman expedition not only crossed the Rocky Mountains long before Lewis and Clarke; they also explored fantastic regions that have yet to be revisited. For good measure—both to add credibility to Rodman’s expedition and to upstage Lewis and Clark even further—Poe alludes to the travels of a real explorer, Sir Alexander Mackenzie: “In regard to the question of the first passage across the Rocky Mountains, it will be seen, from what we have already said, the credit of the enterprize should never have been given to Lewis and Clarke [sic], since Mackenzie succeeded in it, in the year 1793; and that in point of fact, Mr. Rodman was the first who overcame those gigantic barriers; crossing them as he did in 1792” (PT, 1196). In addition to granting Rodman priority of discovery, Poe assigns him a motive which differs fundamentally from that of Lewis and Clark. In a remarkable passage from Chapter Five of the Journal, Rodman describes how he and his fellow voyagers abandoned the commercial or utilitarian purpose of the expedition for the sake of sublimer pleasures: One interest seemed to bind all; or rather we appeared to be a band of voyagers without interest in view—mere travellers for pleasure. What ideas the Canadians might have held upon this subject I cannot, indeed, exactly say. These fellows talked a great deal, to be sure, about the profits of the enterprise, and especially about their expected share of it; yet I can scarcely think they cared much for these points, for they were the most simple-minded, and certainly the most obliging set of beings upon the face of the earth. As for the rest of the crew, I have no doubt in the world that the pecuniary benefit to be afforded by the expedition was the last thing upon which they speculated. Some singular evidences of the feeling which more or less pervaded us all occurred during the prosecution of the voyage. Interests, which, in the settlements, would have been looked upon as of the highest importance, were here treated as matters unworthy of a serious word, and neglected, or totally discarded upon the most frivolous pretext. . . . In all this my own heart was very much with the rest of the party; and I am free to say that, as we proceeded on our journey, I found myself less and less interested in the main business of the expedition, and more and more willing to turn aside in pursuit of idle amusement—if indeed I am right in calling by so feeble a name as amusement that deep and most intense excitement with which I surveyed the wonders and majestic beauties of the wilderness. (PT, 1236–37)

Made explicit here is the conflict between the poetic and pecuniary purposes of the expedition—a conflict that also determines, in one way or another, the

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fate of all of Poe’s imaginary voyagers. True to his “romantic fervor” (PT, 1187), Rodman allows the pleasure of the sublime to divert him from the “main business of the expedition.” Poe also suggests that this abandonment of profit is a kind of precondition for genuine human fellowship, as if such relations could only take root in a wilderness that was untainted by capitalist development. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, composed before The Journal of Julius Rodman but set during a later period, does not so easily resolve the conflict between the poetic and pecuniary motives for exploration. As I shall argue in the next section, this is partly because Pym (the character) romanticizes the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and partly because the antebellum economy—wherein knowledge assumed monetary value—was fractured along sectional lines. All of this adds interest and importance to the text, for in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, we see Poe in the process of consciously refashioning—or capitalizing on—a narrative form that played an acknowledged role in political economy and national expansion. This refashioning is signaled on the first night of Pym’s voyage. Stowed away in the hold of the Grampus, Pym looks for a book to read as soon as the ship sets sail, and he selects a volume on the expedition of Lewis and Clark (PT, 1024). Falling asleep during the perusal of this profitable travelogue, Pym awakens days later to a world that has been utterly transformed, a nightmarish world of mutiny, shipwreck, and cannibalism. As in The Journal of Julius Rodman, then, Poe upstages the central text of American exploring expeditions, but the “main business” of such expeditions continues to haunt Pym’s voyage until the very end. After the mutiny on the Grampus, for example, the mutineers divide into two factions, “wavering . . . between half-engendered notions of profit and pleasure” (PT, 1050). And after Pym has been rescued by the Jane Guy, he repeatedly celebrates the commercial and scientific value of southern exploration, lobbying Captain Guy in much the same way that Jeremiah Reynolds had lobbied Congress. Like other exploration narratives of the day, in other words, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym conflates or confuses two very different discursive functions, one of which is to teach capitalists about new opportunities, the other of which is to convey private readers to new realms of delight.

III. EXPLORATION AS A GENRE The discursive dissonance of Pym has engendered a variety of critical responses to the novel as a whole. While some have interpreted Pym as a journey toward transcendence, many critics have maintained that there is a lack of structural unity which undermines any attempt to deduce a unifying theme or meaning. Still others have been intrigued by the very absence of unity, seeing the novel as a satire of exploration, as a deeply ironic commentary on human

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aspirations, or as a kind of self-deconstructing object lesson in indeterminacy. In these readings, the fractured nature of Pym is treated as a correctable error or as a chosen strategy. Judging by the texts that Poe read or reviewed before composing Pym, however, he must have viewed the exploration narrative as a literary genre that was already conflicted, a genre that necessarily confused fact and fiction in order to serve the discrepant demands of different kinds of readers. It therefore makes sense to consider how Poe managed the confusion that, to a great extent, simply came with the generic territory. Not surprisingly, this confusion can be detected everywhere in Pym, ranging from the motive, implied purpose, and style of the narrative to the material circumstances in which the text was originally produced. It was common for writers such as Poe and Melville to embellish the commercial function of exploration narratives by depicting a dark, romantic impulse toward self-destruction as the primary motivation for long and dangerous voyages. At the beginning of his narrative, Pym confesses that he had long taken perverse pleasure in visions “of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hoards; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown” (PT, 1018). In Moby-Dick, Ishmael makes a similarly scandalous declaration: “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet . . . then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”23 Curiously, however, the self-destructive impulse is not confined to imaginary voyages; this impulse can also be found in the “factual” account by Benjamin Morrell as well as in the published biography of Captain Meriwether Lewis. In the Introduction to his Narrative of Four Voyages, Morrell confesses (or boasts) that he enjoyed the emotional intensity of his first brush with disaster, and that this made him “romantically fond of hazardous and desperate enterprises.”24 Meriwether Lewis likewise suffered from a self-destructive impulse. In the biographical sketch appended to the first published account of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Thomas Jefferson maintains that Lewis suffered from an inherited condition, variously described as “hypochondriac affections” and “sensible depressions of mind,” which ultimately led to Lewis’s suicide in 1809. As Burton Pollin observes, Lewis’s condition closely resembles the “hereditary hypochondria” and “morbid sensibility” of Poe’s Julius Rodman.25 Thus the morbid fascination with danger, manifested by such fictional voyagers as Arthur Gordon Pym and Julius Rodman, was also popularly ascribed to such real explorers as Benjamin Morrell and Meriwether Lewis. No doubt this is related to the new conceptions of the self in German and British romanticism. The ostensibly irrational motive for adventure was thoroughly consistent with romantic psychology, and it should come as no surprise that

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the composers of both real and imaginary voyages used this psychology to account for a variety of impulsive and self-destructive acts. In the exploration narratives of Poe’s day, however, the romantic motives of individual travelers were generally wedded to the nationalist motives of the state or the public. This is especially true of those narratives soliciting funds for future expeditions. In such cases the question of motive had less to do with psychology (why desperate souls long to wander) than with political economy (why shipowners and governments should finance their voyages in the first place). So despite Benjamin Morrell’s romantic pretensions, his Narrative of Four Voyages is filled with economic information about the South Seas, including the desirability of certain bays and trade routes, the condition of fisheries, the kind of local productions available on different islands, and the response of various native tribes to merchant and whaling ships. Significantly, Morrell’s most explicit nationalism is reserved for the still undiscovered regions of the antarctic. Regretting his inability to explore the southernmost latitudes, Morrell hopes for a federally funded expedition: The anguish of my regret, however, was much alleviated by the hope that on my return to the United States, an appeal to the government of my country for countenance and assistance in this (if successful) magnificent enterprise would not be made in vain. To the only free nation on earth should belong the glory of exploring a spot of the globe which is the ne plus ultra of latitude, where all the degrees of longitude are merged into a single point. . . . The vassals of some petty despot may one day place this precious jewel of discovery in the diadem of their royal master. Would to heaven it might be set amongst the stars of our national banner! (67–68)

Jeremiah Reynolds had an even keener understanding of the politics of political economy, and he missed few opportunities to link the imaginative, scientific, and commercial benefits of exploration to an overarching nationalism. In the 1835 narrative that was reviewed in the Messenger, for example, Reynolds proclaims that “our flag should be borne to every portion of the globe, to give civilized and savage man a just impression of the power we possess.”26 In Reynolds’s 1836 Address nationalism is even more explicit, functioning as a kind of transcendent cause. I discuss this at greater length below, but for now it is important to note Poe’s awareness and apparent approval (at least in his nonliterary writings) of the nationalist rhetoric employed by Reynolds. In his August 1836 review for the Southern Literary Messenger, Poe enthusiastically joins Reynolds in deprecating America’s “servile dependence on foreign research” and in celebrating “our national glory and honor” (ER, 1232). This nationalism capitalizes on the romantic daring of explorers without invoking the sublime economy of Symmes’s frugal God. Reducing “divine economy” to human scale, Poe in fact justifies the South-Sea Exploring Expedition by arguing that “enlightened liberality is the truest economy” (ER, 1230). By enclosing

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romanticism within nationalism, the exploration narrative of Poe’s day achieved an economy of its own, for it showed how the irrational exploits of individual travelers could be tabulated in the rational ledger of the state. The confusion over the motives for exploration can also be seen in the multiple purposes of exploration narratives. In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe sometimes appeals to the dark Byronic desire for self-abandon and self-destruction, but at other times he attempts to exploit the widespread curiosity over the South Pole. This tension between romantic and pragmatic impulses is manifested in the very structure of the narrative, for as many commentators have noted, there is a break in the style and purpose of the narrative that roughly coincides with Pym’s rescue by the British Schooner Jane Guy. When it comes to satisfying genuine scientific curiosity, however, the imaginary voyager is at a decided disadvantage. Recognizing his disadvantage, Poe repeatedly evades the practical intent of exploration, instead diverting the narrative into treacherous massacres and hieroglyphic mysteries. This pattern of evasion opens up a critical distance between the implied purpose of Pym and the commercial, scientific, and patriotic functions of the expedition proposed by Reynolds. Significantly, Poe had tried to evade the curse of utility in an earlier southern voyage. In “MS. Found in a Bottle,” the narrator embarks on a long sea voyage to allay “the nervous restlessness which haunted me as a fiend” (PT, 189). During a severe storm, which kills nearly all of the sailors, his rudderless vessel is blown southward and then crushed by a mysterious Dutch ship. In the violence of the collision, the narrator is thrown upward onto the Dutch vessel, where he encounters a ghostly crew, who are evidently blind to his presence. Resolving to record everything up to “the last moment,” the narrator hints that the ghost ship is headed toward the southern pole, where he anticipates discovering “some exciting knowledge—some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction” (PT, 198). The narrator breaks off as the ship plunges into a terrible whirlpool (his last words are, “the ship is quivering—oh God! and—going down!”). Poe’s readers immediately objected to this strategy of withholding ultimate knowledge. Beverley Tucker, for example, noted the literary merits of the story, but he criticized the vague and mysterious ending. Desiring a certain quota of factual detail from even a fictive adventure, Tucker complained that the tale fell short of genuine horror and instead delivered “the mere physique of the horrible.” “I had expected,” said Tucker, “that the author of ‘Morella’ on board the Flying Dutchman would have found a Dutch tongue in his head, would have thawed the silence of his shipmates, and have extracted from them a tale of thrilling interest. . . . Cannot he rescue her yet from her perils, and send us another bottle full of intelligence of her escape, and of her former history? Cannot he, by way of episode, get himself on board of some fated ship, with letters from the spellbound mariners to their friends at home?”27

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Early in his career, then, Poe understood that his readers expected more than “the mere physique” of the horrible; and after reading the exploration narratives of Jeremiah Reynolds and Benjamin Morrell, Poe also understood that readers expected more than the mere physique of profitable information. Arthur Gordon Pym may have begun his journey to indulge gloomy and melancholy desires, but he ultimately tries to add value to his story by settling— or promising to settle—a multitude of unresolved questions about South-Sea navigation. And in order to justify the more fantastic portions of his narrative, Pym quite predictably appeals to the future advancement of scientific knowledge. “I proceed,” he writes, “in utter hopelessness of obtaining credence for all that I shall tell, yet confidently trusting in time and progressing science to verify some of the most important and most improbable of my statements” (PT, 1044). Later, a more calculating Pym measures the value of his scientific discoveries against the demise of his thirty-five crew mates: While . . . I cannot but lament the most unfortunate and bloody events which immediately arose from my advice, I must still be allowed to feel some degree of gratification at having been instrumental, however remotely, in opening to the eye of science one of the most intensely exciting secrets which has ever engrossed its attention. (PT, 1134)

We never learn whether these secrets include the opening at the South Pole and the huge white figure who watches over it, for the manuscript breaks off before all is told. On the surface, it appears that Poe has reverted to his old trick of delivering the “mere physique” of what he has promised, but there is an important difference between “MS. Found in a Bottle” and Pym. In the southern voyage described in “MS. Found in a Bottle” there is really no possibility of a sequel. Poe’s premise is that the narrator’s manuscript has survived the narrator himself; if any exciting secrets have been omitted from the manuscript, they are “never-to-be-imparted.” The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, on the other hand, leaves the door wide open for a sequel. In the final “Note” appended to Pym, Poe—in the guise of an unnamed editor—apologizes for the incomplete condition of the manuscript and offers hope that the missing chapters may someday be recovered. Aside from highlighting the confusion inherent in the genre, the “Note” prepares the way for at least two distinct endings, one fanciful, the other “factual” (that is, a persuasive hoax of an exploration narrative). The imaginary editor even suggests that Poe himself could supply the gist of the missing chapters, were he not dubious of Pym’s story: “The gentleman whose name is mentioned in the preface, and who, from the statement there made, might be supposed able to fill the vacuum, has declined the task—this for satisfactory reasons connected with the general inaccuracy of the details afforded him, and his disbelief in the entire truth of the latter portions of the narration.” Perhaps Poe, like Hans Pfaall, “must have [his] reward” to overcome his diffidence. In any

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event, the disclaimer gives Poe license to produce a fanciful sequel along the lines of Symzonia, the 1828 utopian novel which describes the society of superior beings who inhabit the Earth’s interior. After opening the possibility for one kind of sequel, however, Poe hedges his bet by linking Pym’s missing chapters to the future report of the South Sea Exploring Expedition: “the statements of the author in relation to these regions may shortly be verified or contradicted by means of the governmental expedition now preparing for the Southern Ocean.” Later in the note, the imaginary editor attempts to enclose this fundamental confusion or duplicity within an apparently transcendent piety, but Poe was clearly keeping his secular options open.28 If Pym had sold well, Poe could have written a fantastic conclusion immediately, or he could have waited to compose an ending that was consistent with the findings of the United States Exploring Expedition. Aside from exploiting popular curiosity over a recently completed expedition, this second approach would have enabled Poe to upstage the real expedition by sending Pym to whatever regions remained unexplored (much as Julius Rodman upstaged—albeit belatedly— the expedition of Lewis and Clark). If the opportunity arose, Poe could even have contracted with Harper and Brothers—the publisher of Pym—to produce a popular or ghostwritten account of the real expedition, thereby capitalizing on his alleged disbelief in fantastic voyages and his alleged devotion to accurate details. The confusion between imaginary and actual exploration, in other words, existed not only in Pym and the genre it purported to exemplify but also in the material conditions under which the novel was conceived and produced. And curiously, all of the confusion discussed above can be traced back to the House of Harper, which was in many ways the supreme beneficiary of the uncertain status of exploration narratives. The House of Harper, it should be recalled, is where Poe first encountered the figure of the Capital Reader, who decided what to publish based upon “anticipations of profit or loss, rather than any intrinsic merit of a work or its author.” This reader had rejected Poe’s proposal to publish a collection of his tales as a book, directing him instead to work with longer and more popular narrative forms. This advice was reiterated on several occasions. James K. Paulding, acting as an intermediary, urged Poe to “lower himself a little to the ordinary comprehension of the generality of readers” and to “undertake a Tale in a couple of volumes, for that is the magic number.” When Harper & Brothers rejected the short story collection, they likewise advised him that “readers in this country have a decided preference for works (especially fiction) in which a single and connected story occupies a whole volume, or a number of volumes.”29 Shortly after receiving this advice, Poe began work on Pym, his first sustained work of fiction. As Joseph V. Ridgely has cogently argued, the composition of Pym was a fitful and sporadic process, which was probably conducted during several discrete stages.30 The first few chapters were written while Poe was still editor of the

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Messenger; these were published serially in the January and February (1837) issues of the magazine. But then Poe, like one of his ill-fated narrators, was separated from his manuscript by a series of calamities. In January 1837 Poe lost his editorial job with the Messenger. Believing he would find work in New York, Poe moved his family to that city by February of 1837. He failed, however, to turn up any steady work, and on May 10, New York banks suspended specie payments, thereby heralding the Panic of 1837. In that same inauspicious month, Harpers announced the forthcoming publication of Pym, and on June 10 the firm copyrighted the title, but the book itself did not appear until July 1838. During this entire period, Poe failed to secure any permanent employment. Early in 1838, Poe and his family fled from the stagnant economy of New York to Philadelphia, but this brought little improvement. Neighbors in Philadelphia reported that the family was “literally suffering for want of food” (Poe Log, 248). This explains why, in the month that Pym was published, Poe begged the Secretary of the Navy for “the most unimportant Clerkship in your gift—any thing, by sea or land—to relieve me from the miserable life of literary drudgery to which I now, with a breaking heart, submit.” I recount these details because they contradict the image of Poe as a consummate artist in full control of his creations, and this in turn raises questions about the working relationship between Poe and the House of Harper. Traces of this relationship can be found in Poe’s sources for Pym. As noted above, Poe lifted whole sections out of Reynolds’s Address and Morrell’s Narrative of Four Voyages; other major sources include John L. Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea and the Holy Land, and Alexander Keith’s Evidence of the Truth of the Christian Religion. All of these texts provided incidents and anecdotes, all of them helped to shape Poe’s understanding of the genre of Pym, and all of them were published by Harper and Brothers. Exactly what transpired between Poe and the Harpers is open to speculation, but Poe was obviously in a desperate position, and the Brothers Harper were not averse to shaping their products for market. When John L. Stephens returned from travels in the Middle East, for example, he asked the Harpers which books were most saleable. James Harper replied: “Travels sell about the best of anything we get ahold of. They don’t always go with a rush, like a novel by a celebrated author, but they sell longer, and in the end, pay better.” Harper then asked Stephens to do a book on his travels, but Stephens demurred, explaining that he had traveled fast and had taken no useful notes. Harper’s reply is significant: “That is no matter. . . . We have got plenty of books about those countries. You just pick out as many as you want, and I will send them home for you; you can dish up something” (Exman, Brothers Harper, 94–95). It is entirely plausible, then, that Harpers encouraged or at least condoned Poe’s extensive borrowings from Morrell’s narrative, for this would “fill out” Pym with market-tested material that the firm already owned. This would mean that the Harpers were not only the passive beneficiaries of the confusion

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between actual and imaginary voyages; they were also the active—albeit silent—partners in the production of this confusion. There is one final twist in this story of Pym’s material origins. From what has been said thus far, it is apparent that Benjamin Morrell’s Narrative of Four Voyages was one of the most popular exploration narratives in antebellum America. The long subtitle suggests why it sold well in the mass literary market: Comprising Critical Surveys of Coasts and Islands, with Sailing Directions. And an account of some new and valuable discoveries, including the Massacre Islands, where thirteen of the Author’s Crew were massacred and eaten by Cannibals. The reference to “sailing directions” indicates that Morrell also sought to attract the attention of shipowners and investors. At one point near the end of the narrative, Morrell in fact departs from his “tell all” strategy, claiming that he possesses information which is just too precious for mass distribution: “If there be sufficient commercial enterprise in the United States to fit out an expedition to these islands . . . the stockholders of the concern would not only realize incalculable profits by the first voyage, but might monopolize the invaluable trade as long as they please; because I alone know where these islands are situated” (466). Similar boasts appear in countless imaginary voyages, but in this case the claim enhances Morrell’s credibility by showing that he knows the real value of a secret. And when individual investors could not be prevailed upon to pay for such secrets, Morrell invokes national self-interest to induce the federal government to act as a funder (and a reader) of future voyages. By appealing to all these different kinds of readers, Morrell’s exploration narrative would have looked extremely lucrative to the one reader who mattered most: the Capital Reader at Harpers. Too lucrative to be true, it turns out, for Morrell’s Narrative was actually written by someone else. During his voyages, Morrell had collected various notes and memoranda, but Harpers paid Samuel Woodworth, a poet and journalist, to “rewrite” these raw materials into “a valuable book of four or five hundred octavo pages.” According to Eugene Exman, A Narrative of Four Voyages was the first ghost-written text ever produced by Harpers.31 To generate the quota of pages, Woodworth embellished liberally and borrowed freely from other sources; as Burton Pollin has observed, this ghost-writing method explains many of the melodramatic, overwritten, or simply inaccurate portions of Morrell’s text.32 But although seasoned navigators may have had doubts, the book circulated as a genuine, first-hand account. One reviewer gushed that “it does not often fall to our lot to be able to commend a book of this kind with as much confidence as we can Morrell’s ‘Four Voyages.’ ” Another proclaimed that “everyone will want to read this book, and our community will not be slow in ranking the author as the American Cook or Parry.”33 It is not clear what Poe knew about the production of Morrell’s Narrative, but its ghost-written status, along with the “disbelief” ascribed to Poe in the final note, certainly complicates Pym’s pretenses to scientific discovery. Taken to-

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gether, these circumstances also complicate the genealogy of Poe’s text. Based upon what is now known, a ghostwritten narrative marketed as genuine was borrowed to lend credibility to Pym, an imaginary voyage marketed as a genuine narrative that was once “mistakenly” labeled as fiction (and that should, according to the final note, be labeled as fiction again). This can be said differently, with no loss of confusion, if we include the real and imaginary personae of the various speakers who appear in Pym. To wit: in the beginning, Poe speaking as the purportedly real Pym re-presents several chapters which Poe speaking as the purportedly imaginary Pym had first presented in the “garb of fiction”; near the end, Poe speaking as Pym re-presents several chapters which Woodworth speaking as Morrell had first presented in the guise of fact; and in the concluding note, Poe—speaking as no one in particular but certainly not himself—presents a disrupted manuscript, a dubious Poe, and a dead Pym, all in the guise of a done book. But the confusion over the nature and function of exploration narratives was not generated solely by the House of Harper; as illustrated by the career of James Kirke Paulding, the exploration narrative assumed its protean character in response to widespread economic, cultural, and ideological circumstances. Among other things, Paulding’s experiences show that exploration narratives were not trapped within the prison-house of language or the locked room of the imagination. A native New Yorker, Paulding toured the South in 1816 and published an account of his travels a year later. Letters from the South contains some social satire and criticism, but it explicitly rejects the prevailing image of white Southerners as a wild, drunken, violent people: “Before I had been long in this part of the world, I discovered, to my great surprise, that the people were very much like other folks, only a little more hospitable.”34 By the time he wrote Slavery in the United States, however, Paulding had apparently decided that derogatory stereotypes were accurate if applied to black Southerners. To make his case, Paulding ransacked the narratives of British explorers for signs of African inferiority: “No one can peruse the travels of Mungo Park without receiving the conviction that [Africans] are a treacherous, inhospitable, and worthless breed.”35 Slavery in the United States was published in 1836, the same year that Paulding informed Poe of the profit-motivated reader at the House of Harper. By the time Pym was published in 1838, Paulding had been appointed Secretary of the Navy, and it was under Paulding’s authority that the United States Exploring Expedition finally set sail. Paulding in fact issued the official orders for the Expedition to its commander, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes. Like Jefferson’s letter to Meriwether Lewis, Paulding’s letter to Wilkes contains detailed instructions about logistics and duties, as well as more general comments about cross-cultural diplomacy and the primary goals of the mission. Evoking sensational accounts of cannibalism and massacres, Paulding warns that “treachery is one of the invariable

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characteristics of savages and barbarians,” but he also counsels Wilkes to practice “that courtesy and kindness towards the natives, which is understood and felt by all classes of mankind.”36 Later in the letter, Paulding even urges Wilkes to consider the natives’ point of view: Finally, you will recollect, that though you may frequently be carried beyond the sphere of social life, and the restraints of law, yet that the obligations of justice and humanity are always and every where equally imperative in our intercourse with men, and most especially savages; that we seek them, not they us; and that if we expect to derive advantages from the intercourse, we should endeavour to confer benefits in return. (227–28)

For Paulding, the “advantages” to the United States are predominantly economic. In his orders concerning specific islands, for example, Paulding instructs Wilkes to “ascertain its resources and facilities for trade” (223) or to “ascertain the disposition of the inhabitants of the islands of this archipelago for commerce, their productions and resources” (225). Significantly, Paulding seems less excited about the advancement of science than either Poe or Jeremiah Reynolds, for he treats this aspect of the expedition as a kind of afterthought: “Although the primary object of the Expedition is the promotion of the great interests of commerce and navigation, yet you will take all occasions, not incompatible with the great purposes of your undertaking, to extend the bounds of science, and promote the acquisition of knowledge” (228). At the close of the letter, Paulding again emphasizes the non-imaginary nature of the voyage, this time by ordering Wilkes to confiscate from the crew “all journals, memorandums, remarks, writings, drawings, sketches, and paintings” which might be smuggled into an unauthorized narrative of the expedition. In other words, two years after he helped inspire Poe to compose an imaginary voyage, Paulding was issuing orders to ensure that “no journal of these voyages, either partial or complete, should be published, without the authority and under the supervision of the government of the United States” (229; emphasis added). When the Expedition orders were signed and dated (11 August 1838), Paulding was still overwhelmed by the new duties of his position, and his desk was undoubtedly clogged with other correspondence. Had he delved through the papers on his desk, he probably would have found the poignant note from Poe, who had just published Pym and who desperately wanted to be rescued from his “miserable life of literary drudgery.” In light of this drudgery, it is not surprising that Poe abandoned long literary forms until the end of his career. Indeed, the troubled production of Pym helps to explain why Poe so yearned to control his own magazine, for in theory this would have enabled him to bypass book publishers altogether. Still, Poe’s experiment with the exploration narrative reveals some of the chief problems of literary production in antebellum America. Following the advice of publishers and other commercial writers, Poe tried his hand at a genre that was wavering between conflicting

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measures of value: the pecuniary value of accurate information and the poetic value of thrilling adventure. He discovered, moreover, that this conflict was encouraged and even produced by the House of Harper, which paid anonymous commercial writers to manufacture texts bearing the signature of celebrity explorers. Upon examining these texts, Poe surely recognized that the genre was fraught by other conflicts: between romantic individualism and national aggrandizement; between irrational explorers and rational commercial designs; and indeed, between the dream of creative freedom and the horrid laws of political economy. Poe’s awareness of these conflicts undoubtedly explains his hesitancy to designate a transcendent purpose of exploration, for unlike Reynolds, Morrell, or Paulding, Poe refuses to orient his voyage toward pecuniary profit or national power. But before investigating Poe’s diffidence toward economic nationalism, we must first consider another conflict at the heart of Pym, namely the climactic confrontation between explorers and natives. This confrontation, which raises profound questions about the relation between race and global knowledge, is given precedence by the very structure of the narrative. That is to say, instead of depicting a confrontation with the sublime and terrifying power of nature, as in the Grampus voyage, and instead of revealing the profitable answer to some great scientific secret, as in the voyage envisioned by Jeremiah Reynolds, Poe spends most of the final chapters on the benighted island of Tsalal, where black natives plot the destruction of the fortune-seeking white crew. According to the conventions of the genre, explorers were inevitably measured by their ability to make pivotal judgments from the most superficial evidence. Pym and the crew of the Jane Guy fail dismally in this regard, deceived as much by the surfaces of the earth as by the faces of men.

IV. RACE AND THE READING OF THE EARTH The multiple incidents of deception and misinterpretation in Pym all call attention to conflicts among the reigning forms of knowledge.37 In order to understand the significance of these conflicts, it is important to realize that they are in some measure attributable to—if not constitutive of—the genre itself. Unfortunately, it is conventional to view the confusion and unevenness of Pym as being solely the result of Poe’s artistic choices or miscalculations. In Beneath the American Renaissance, for example, David Reynolds interprets the confusion in Pym as a symptom of Poe’s inability to combine two popular narrative forms. According to Reynolds, “the novel as a whole can be seen as an attempted fusion of two modes—Dark Adventure fiction, featuring savagery and nightmare imagery, and the scientific social text, featuring mimetic reportage of intriguing facts.”38 But Poe himself envisioned a different

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opposition within a single “mode” or narrative form. In 1837, after having left the Messenger to seek his fortune in New York, and finding instead one of the most dire financial panics of the nineteenth century, Poe desperately sought editorial work while he put the final touches on Pym. His sole work of criticism from this period is a review of John L. Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in the Holy Land. At the conclusion of the piece, he praises Stephens for finding the happy medium between two extreme versions of the exploration narrative. According to Poe, Stephens’s narrative is “equally free from the exaggerated sentimentality of Chateaubriand, or the sublimated, the too French enthusiasm of Lamartine on the one hand, and on the other from the degrading spirit of utilitarianism, which sees in mountains and waterfalls only quarries and manufacturing sites” (ER, 941). So although David Reynolds views Pym as an unsuccessful attempt to combine two distinct discursive modes, Poe’s ideal narrative would instead seek to negotiate between two contradictory ways of taking in the world, one of which longs for the emotional intensity of the natural sublime, and another which sees earth and water as pure instruments of production.39 The narratives by Morrell and Reynolds waver between similar extremes, though for obvious reasons both writers were most anxious about having their proposals dismissed as “romantic” or “enthusiastic.” Morrell in fact suffered this fate when he tried to persuade his stockholders to invest in the African cattle trade: “This important discovery I laid before my owners, on my return to New-York for this present voyage; but they thought me enthusiastic, the project chimerical, and refused to listen to it” (Four Voyages, 288). Reynolds, chastened by the public response to Symmes, confronted the issue directly: “Yes, I repeat it! five years of adventure, with every opportunity of observation, have impressed upon my mind the strong and abiding conviction, that such an expedition as that now proposed, is called for by considerations of honour, interest, humanity, and imperious duty. Is this the language of enthusiasm, excited by a spirit of wild adventure, unconnected with sober reality, and unsustained by well authenticated facts? If there be any of my hearers of this opinion, especially among those whose duty it is to investigate and decide on all matters of national concern, we must bespeak their attention for yet a few moments longer.”

Reynolds bespeaks their attention for sixty-nine more pages, perhaps attempting to win by sheer perseverance what he cannot achieve by reason alone.40 He does, nevertheless, display an awareness of the extremes between which narratives of antarctic exploration must negotiate. As Mary Pratt suggests in her study of nineteenth-century travel writing and ethnography, a similar negotiation characterizes narratives of African exploration. According to Pratt, explorers such as John Barrow, Richard F. Burton, David Livingstone, and Mungo Park often represented their writings as instruments for the capitalist develop-

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ment of Africa. David Livingstone, for example, hoped that his narrative would “contribute to the information which will cause the great and fertile continents of Africa to be no longer kept wantonly sealed, but made available as a scene of European enterprise.”41 Mindful of their commercial function, travel writers sometimes made explicit transitions from the natural to the imperial sublime. In his description of Lake Victoria Nyanaza, John Hanning Speke forgoes “the pleasure of the mere view” for “those more intense and exciting emotions which are called up by the consideration of the commercial and geographical importance of the prospect before me.”42 Other explorers had a finer appreciation of “the pleasure of the mere view.” Though commercial and geographical reporting might excite venture capitalists, it was dry stuff to most readers. This explains why Mungo Park initially set out to describe “new sources of wealth and new channels of commerce,” but then succumbed to the sentimental power of his African sublime.43 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym follows a more complicated course. Like Reynolds and Morrell, Pym worries that his narrative, so filled with marvelous incidents, will be viewed as “an impudent and ingenious fiction.”44 The title page of Pym does nothing to discourage such a judgment, advertising a dark and terrifying adventure “comprising the details of a mutiny and atrocious butchery on board the American brig Grampus, on her way to the South Seas, in the month of June, 1827. With an account of the recapture of the vessel by the survivers; their shipwreck and subsequent horrible sufferings from famine . . . together with the incredible adventures and discoveries still farther south . . .” Nevertheless, Pym hopes that “the facts of my narrative would prove of such a nature as to carry with them sufficient evidence of their own authenticity” (PT, 1008). In the first part of the narrative, these “facts” incline marvelously toward fiction, but in the second half of the narrative, Poe does emphasize the scientific and commercial value of the voyage, primarily by borrowing liberally from Reynolds and Morrell. Poe perhaps recognized the artistic liabilities of this dry, informational discourse, for in the midst of it he sends Pym to a singular island whose inhabitants seem genetically incapable of assuming a place in the expanding world economy. By steering such a course between the sublime and the bottom line, Poe was evidently trying to follow the principles of travel writing set forth in his review of Stephens’s Incidents of Travel. These principles apply to the very earth and water of Tsalal, for Poe consistently treats them as something other than natural symbols or means of production. In the Stephens review, it is to be recalled, Poe singles out the representation of “mountains and waterfalls” for special criticism. To travel writers of Poe’s day, such scenes served as a sort of invitation, either to indulge in poetic rumination, or to assess the prospects for economic development. Reynolds, interestingly enough, did both at the same time when he offered a poetic description of American economic history. In his Address, Reynolds

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gives a brief sketch of America’s transition from wilderness to hyper-productive capitalism. At the start of colonization, according to Reynolds, every spot of earth was measured by its “productive results,” and in due time “the bosom of the earth poured forth its abundance” (Pacific and Indian Oceans, 12). By imparting value to the “vilest substances,” informed human labor will continue to transform ancient “fables” about hidden treasure into modern economic realities. Reynolds acknowledges that this transformation may destroy the sacred or mythical quality of nature, but for him productivity is an irresistible force which must sooner or later dominate the very atoms of the material world: A sober, business spirit is abroad, and neither Fauns nor Dryads can protect the grove when it is wanted for the saw or axe. It must fall if utility require the sacrifice. If any there be who mourn over these changes, we are not among them. The great branches of our national industry will constantly go on, destroying and recombining the elements of productiveness, till every atom is made to bear its greatest amount of value, and the wildest speculations of the theorist are more than equalled by the reality. (14–15)

It is likely that Poe had such a passage in mind when he referred to “the degrading spirit of utilitarianism, which sees in mountains and waterfalls only quarries and manufacturing sites” (ER, 941). In his “Sonnet—To Science,” after all, Poe laments the very changes celebrated by Reynolds. The sonnet, one of Poe’s earliest poetic compositions, denounces science as a “vulture” which has “dragged Diana from her car” and “driven the Hamadryad from the wood” (PT, 38). Aside from lauding what Poe laments, Reynolds identifies the real entity that drove the dryad from the wood: not science but economic “utility.” It is therefore no surprise that Poe should try to extract something besides economic value from the earth and water on Tsalal. His design is achieved partly through a simple reversal, since the earth of Tsalal has much more to do with destruction than production. The natives, for example, transform the hills into instruments of annihilation, burying the crew of the Jane Guy under “the chaotic ruins of more than a million tons of earth and stone” (PT, 1155). Poe also avoids the other, “sublimated” extreme, for instead of suffering the soapstone hills to serve as poetic symbols, he turns the rock into a kind of tablet for supernatural writing. According to the final note, the chasm opened up by the ambush forms the letters for the Ethiopian verbal root “to be shady,” while a wall within the chasm contains the Arabic verb root “to be white” and the Egyptian word designating “the region of the south” (PT, 1181). The “editor” of the note sees a transcendent and possibly racial meaning in all of this: “Nothing white was to be found at Tsalal, and nothing otherwise in the subsequent voyage to the region beyond” (PT, 1182).

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Though this generalization is somewhat inaccurate, many critics have taken it as further proof of Poe’s racist agenda. Nevertheless, the mysterious nature of the writing on the wall has not been completely dispelled by ideological interpretations. Michael Warner, for example, asserts that “nothing is clearer than that these messages refer to the political crisis of race in the union,” but then he immediately adds that “nothing is less clear than how they refer to that crisis.”45 Judging by the sequence of composition, the writing on the wall probably reflects Poe’s attempt to lend unity or closure to the narrative; as J. V. Ridgely has argued, the hieroglyphics of Chapter Twenty-three and the philological ruminations of the final note were probably added after the rest of the manuscript had been completed.46 Poe is known to have contacted the classical scholar Charles Anthon for assistance on the Stephens review, and it is more than likely that Poe relied on Anthon’s published work for the ending to Pym.47 One of the more important of these works is Anthon’s 1837 review of Baron de Merian’s Principes de l’étude comparative des langues (from which Poe may have obtained “Tsalal” for the name of the island). Only nominally concerned with Merian’s book, the review contains Anthon’s thoughts on the value of comparative philology, including the light that this new science may shed on the primitive linguistic and racial unity of mankind. According to Anthon, comparative philology provides strong evidence that “a primitive and common language must at one time or another have existed.”48 Anthon speculates that if this primitive language were still in existence, we would “know it in a moment by its numerous instances of what grammarians term onomatopoeia, or the adaptation of sound to sense” (“Affiliation of Languages,” 133). As examples, he discusses how various languages approximate the call of the cuckoo and the howl of the wolf. In regard to Pym, this of course brings to mind the tongue of the Tsalal natives, which in several cases does not so much approximate as precisely duplicate the sounds of animals. Thus the name “Tsalal” commences with “a prolonged hissing sound . . . which was precisely the same with the note of the black bittern we had eaten upon the summit of the hill” (PT, 1177), and the natives’ cry of “Tekeli-li!” precisely mimics the “scream” of the “gigantic and pallidly white birds” that fly continuously out of the vaporous veil at the end of the novel (PT, 1179). Both Poe and Anthon, then, were undoubtedly intrigued by the prospect of recovering the original tongue, but for Anthon, the existence of a single primitive language implies that “all the families of man have sprung from one common source, and that we are all the children of the same common parents” (110). Anthon does not attempt to prove this claim himself; instead, he cites—with apparent approval—Prichard’s Physical History of Mankind: The varieties of race, and the differences of color, which now attract attention, could not possibly in his opinion have existed before the flood, since otherwise they would all have been found, at the period of that visitation, in the immediate family of Noah,

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when immured within the ark. [Prichard] assigns them therefore to a subsequent period, and regards these peculiarities as the result of time, and the gradual influence of climate. . . . To him, in fact, the color and the texture of the skin in the African appear intended to accommodate the latter to the burning sky of the torrid zone, where the whiter portion of our race would inevitably sicken and perish, and where they have been known to do so; and he can hardly imagine that what has been meant by Providence as a means of health and safety, should have been also intended as a badge of degradation. (134–35)

As might be expected, Poe avoids following Anthon’s progressive lead, and instead the ending of Pym exploits the apocalyptic potential of comparative linguistics. That is, instead of finding traces of an original human unity, Poe emphasizes the confusions of tongues (and indeed, of races and economic orders) associated with the fall of Babel. But of course this returns us to the original mystery, namely the meaning of writing on the wall. This meaning is complicated by several factors: the possibility that a hoaxing Poe may have written his own name within the hills; the abrupt end to the novel, which fails to clarify Poe’s design; and of course the message itself, which continues to baffle readers. Surely it does not simply mean “Keep the South White,”49 for in terms of U.S. racial demographics, the North was the white region, and the South was heavily invested—economically and politically—in retaining its large population of black slaves. There is, in addition, some basis for associating “The region of the south” with Pym’s ultimate destination; and “To be white, whence all inflections of brilliancy and whiteness” may likewise be linked to the god-like white figure at the end of Chapter Twenty-five. In his 1837 review, Charles Anthon in fact suggests that the Sanskrit term for deity is derived from the verb meaning “to be brilliant.”50 With these crude correspondences, the chasm writing could mean something as simple as “Pass through the darkness to the region of the south, and there will be (the white) god.” The biblical meaning should not, however, be neglected, for it is entirely plausible that Poe was drawing an analogy between the chasms of Tsalal and the famous writing on the wall in the Book of Daniel. As many critics have noted, the writing on the chasm wall in Pym seems to hold the key to unfolding events, and the incessant cry “Tekeli-li!” resembles one of the words that appear on the wall during Belshaz’zar’s feast (“MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN”). All of these words designate weights, and Daniel interprets “tekel” to mean “you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting” (Daniel 5:27). To be more precise, however, “Tekel” is another name for shekel, the fundamental unit of money in the ancient Semitic world. (This translation conjures up the oddly appropriate image of frightened Tsalal natives screaming “Money! Money!” when confronted by anything white.) Such a

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translation corresponds too neatly with my previous comments on the political economy of exploration to be more than mere coincidence, but it should also be noted that “pim” (or “pym” as it appeared on many coins) is also a unit of money mentioned in the Bible.51 There is, moreover, a crucial political message in Daniel’s deciphering that has implications for Pym. According to the full text, Daniel prophesies not only that Belshaz’zar will fall, but that his kingdom will be “divided and given to the Medes and Persians” (Daniel 5:28). Such a prophecy would have a special relevance for Poe, a commercial writer from the South who was experimenting with an implicitly nationalist literary form. In many ways, the prospect of a divided kingdom is precisely what complicates the ending of Pym, for as suggested in the final section of this chapter, Poe’s hesitancy to embrace a unifying nationalism not only registers the economic contradictions between North and South; it also anticipates, albeit darkly, the impending crisis of the Union. Before leaving the chasm, however, it is important to realize that in the context of his career, Poe almost always invokes “earth-writing” and other forms of material language in response to some specific predicament of the commercial writer. Transforming the chasm into a written word is, after all, just another way of re-literalizing the symbol, which is what Poe does to the mason’s trowel in “The Cask of Amontillado.” This strategy enables Montresor to avenge the unmentioned outrages of Fortunato, who had previously enjoyed all the blessings of social as well as symbolic power. As I demonstrate in succeeding chapters, hieroglyphic or material writing plays a more significant role in other tales by Poe. In “The Gold-Bug,” for example, Legrand decodes an old pirate cryptogram to redeem himself from his fallen economic and social condition. The “earth-writing” on Tsalal likewise resembles the elemental poetics of “The Domain of Arnheim” and “The Power of Words,” since both of these tales convert the material world into signs or physical “poems.” A full discussion of these texts is contained in Chapter Nine; for now I shall simply note that the fantastic vision of “The Power of Words” is thoroughly consistent with Poe’s lifelong quest to attain control over the material product of his labor. The earth-writing on Tsalal represents one of the first and most curious stages of this quest, for by engraving the rock with a mysterious message, perhaps a message in the original human tongue, Poe issues a kind of protest against the venal confusion or corruption of tongues epitomized by the exploration narrative. Perhaps this explains why the terrain of Tsalal ultimately proves hostile to the sentimental and especially the mercantile traveler. Resistant to being viewed as a quarry or manufacturing site by the “degrading spirit of utilitarianism,” Tsalal weighs the language of commerce and finds it wanting. This rejection of economic discourse is further highlighted by the biblical resonance of the final sentence of the Note: “I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock.”52 To Captain Guy’s utilitarian eyes,

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the natural resources on Tsalal had promised “profitable speculation” (PT, 1139), but the message within the rock reveals that the elements will be taken as neither romantic symbols nor capitalist commodities. The water on Tsalal also resists being seen through utilitarian eyes, and like the rock, it signifies but darkly to an astonished Pym. Because the “singular character of the water” has inspired so many interpretations, it is useful to begin with a generous excerpt: On account of the singular character of the water, we refused to taste it, supposing it to be polluted . . . It was not colorless, nor was it of any one uniform color— presenting to the eye, as it flowed, every possible shade of purple, like the hues of a changeable silk. This variation in shade was produced in a manner which excited as profound astonishment in the minds of our party as the mirror had done in the case of Too-wit. Upon collecting a basinful, and allowing it to settle thoroughly, we perceived that the whole mass of liquid was made up of a number of distinct veins, each of a distinct hue; that these veins did not commingle, and that their cohesion was perfect in regard to their own particles among themselves, and imperfect in regard to neighboring veins. Upon passing the blade of a knife athwart the veins, the water closed over it immediately, as with us, and also, in withdrawing it, all traces of the passage of the knife were instantly obliterated. If, however, the blade was passed down accurately between the two veins, a perfect separation was effected, which the power of cohesion did not immediately rectify. The phenomenon of this water formed the first definite link in that vast chain of apparent miracles with which I was destined to be at length encircled. (PT, 1140–41)

Is Pym, then, a prisoner of miracles? And what exactly are we to make of this water which is both singular and plural, singular because it is plural? Not surprisingly, the water has elicited conflicting interpretations, but instead of trying to do justice to this diversity of opinion, I shall focus on positions that loosely correspond to the extremes mentioned in Poe’s review of Stephens. At one extreme are the source studies that impute the singular character of the water to actual geological surveys or hydrographical reports; at the other limit are the more speculative readings that see the water as “nature’s guide to apartheid.”53 According to some source studies, the singular water on Tsalal derives from scientific reports that Poe combined and embellished for his narrative. L. Moffitt Cecil, for example, finds similarities between the description of the water in Pym and contemporary geological reports concerning the characteristics of several Virginia springs. “Unnatural as these Tsalalian waters first appear to be,” according to Cecil, “natural sources for them are not very far to seek.”54 Given Poe’s hoaxes of natural science and his experiments with earth-writing, however, it is difficult to ascertain what constitutes the “natural” in Pym. It is also difficult to ascertain Poe’s attitude toward geological surveys, colored as they were by economic interest or “the degrading spirit of utilitarianism.” As

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indicated in Cecil’s references, the Virginia Geological Survey was motivated not by mere curiosity, but rather by a desire to assess the economic importance of the state’s natural resources. Poe clearly understood that the Survey, like the United States Exploring Expedition, had to be justified and explained in economic terms. Reviewing Joseph Martin’s Gazetteer of Virginia in the February 1836 Messenger, Poe notes that “the resources of our great commonwealth are immense, and if we could once get the public mind into a condition favorable to their full development, the most important consequences might be expected to follow.”55 In 1836 it was Poe’s job to make such statements; as editor of the Messenger, he supported numerous plans for economic development, many of which involved the state’s vast natural resources. By the time he was completing Pym in 1837, however, Poe had already left the Messenger and the Commonwealth of Virginia, so he must have felt less obliged to act as a booster for the development of mineral springs, quarries, and manufacturing sites. Finally, there are significant differences between the marvelous water on Tsalal and the natural springs described in various geological reports. Cecil himself admits that although he discovered a reference to spring water with bluish-gray tints, he found no mention of discrete, unmingled veins of water (“Poe’s Tsalal,” 402). It is entirely justifiable, then, to pass beyond natural sources and to wonder about the figural meaning of the water, especially since Pym describes it as the first link in a “vast chain of apparent miracles.” At the other extreme, the question is whether the water should be taken as a symbol (or symbolic argument) for the separation of the races. Several details about the miraculous water support this view. As in Eureka, Poe’s account of the cohesive particles seems more like an analysis of social behavior; the particles, as if by choice, associate only with their own kind.56 And insofar as Tsalal is the scene of a deadly confrontation between blacks and whites, it would seem plausible that the separate veins of colored water, like the mysterious chasms, carry a racial message. Thus Dana Nelson, echoing Harold Beaver, takes the water as evidence of a “natural apartheid” or “a natural principle of color segregation” on the island (Word in Black and White, 96). There are, however, some problems with taking the water as an unambiguous symbol of racial segregation. First, the water in the brook does not contain every possible color, but only hues of purple (which is why some have seen it as a symbol of blood). Second, the principle of racial segregation is violated by Pym’s indispensable ally, Dirk Peters, for Peters is explicitly described as being of mixed race (European and Native American, though his skull is likened to “the head of most Negroes”). This leads to a third point, namely that even if the water symbolically represents an antagonism between races, it may be descriptive of conditions on the island but not necessarily prescriptive for other regions. Finally, clarity—if not crudeness—would seem to be a sine qua non of political symbolism, and yet Poe has left the meaning of the water obscure, as if he were more interested in producing an aura of wonder.

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These points can be illustrated—in reverse—by a travel narrative that actually does employ water as a symbol of racial segregation, a narrative that Poe may have had in mind when he deprecated the “the sublimated, the too French enthusiasm of Lamartine.” The text in question was first written by Lamartine himself, and later quoted in a footnote to Drayton’s The South Vindicated to illustrate “the absurdity of any attempt at amalgamation.” When Beverley Tucker reviewed Drayton’s book for the Southern Literary Messenger, he found the Lamartine material “so apt to our purpose” that he decided to reprint the entire excerpt. Since Poe was then editor of the Messenger, he undoubtedly knew the oft-quoted passage in which Lamartine draws an explicit analogy between water and race: The influence of governments and laws has less power, radically, than is supposed, over the manners and instincts of any people, while the primitive constitution and the blood of the race have always their influence, and manifest themselves, thousands of years afterwards, in the physical formations and moral habits of a particular family or tribe. Human nature flows in rivers and streams into the vast ocean of humanity; but its waters mingle but slowly, sometimes never; and it emerges again, like the Rhone from the Lake of Geneva, with its own taste and color. Here is indeed an abyss of thought and meditation, and at the same time a grand secret for legislators. As long as they keep the spirit of the race in view they succeed; but they fail when they strive against this natural predisposition: nature is stronger than they are. This sentiment is not that of the philosophers of the present time, but it is evident to the traveler; and there is more philosophy to be found in a caravan journey of a hundred leagues, than in ten years’ reading and meditation.57

What in this passage might be construed as “sublimated” or “French” enthusiasm? As indicated by both Reynolds and Morrell, “enthusiasm” in a travel narrative generally denoted fanciful, unreliable description or outright fabrication. “French” enthusiasm is merely a pompous version of the same; as Poe remarked in an 1841 review, “if a Frenchman is invariably witty, he is not the less everlastingly bombastic” (ER, 990). Beyond a few brief disparagements such as this, Poe does not elaborate on his view of Lamartine, but in all likelihood he would have agreed with the following assessment from the New York Review: His “Travels in the East” first disenchanted us. . . . We expected to breathe an atmosphere of excitement, but not of strained and turgid sensibility. We did not expect to have the ideal forced upon us at every step—impeding our progress, obscuring our vision—actually crammed into us—amplified as it was beyond all bounds by its thick vestment of metaphor and simile. We did not expect the laborious expansion of every object, however insignificant, into romantic proportions . . . nor the perpetual effort to find resemblances between things which of themselves certainly suggest no comparison.58

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It is entirely possible, in other words, that Poe was consciously avoiding the bombastic style of Lamartine when he created the singular water on Tsalal. If this is the case, it suggests that Poe was attempting to mediate between sublimated enthusiasm and degraded utilitarianism in the most elemental way imaginable. To Poe’s eyes, water would have presented itself as the ideal element of mediation, for in the space of two months it had been described, in the pages of the Messenger, as an instrument of economic development and as an emblem of racial purity. If the water is so fluid a signifier, there are obviously problems with attempting to deduce from it the overall meaning of the Tsalal episode (let alone the entire narrative). In fact, all interpretations of the water as a symbol of racial segregation invariably presuppose the position which the water then “confirms.” The water, however, is not intrinsically racist; in a different context, it could in fact surpass the quilt or rainbow as a symbol of multiculturalism: many veins flowing as one river, each vein retaining its own identity. In all likelihood, of course, Poe had no such meaning in mind when he first imagined the singular water on Tsalal. Still, his professed desire for a narrative style between sublimated enthusiasm and degraded utilitarianism raises pivotal questions, not only for Pym, but for literary interpretation in general. How does an ostensibly literary choice about style determine the meaning and social impact of a text? Can style subvert the conventions of a popular genre, and how do we interpret the disparity between a renegade text and its generic tradition? Finally, when the presumptive political message of a text becomes subtle and ambiguous, precisely who is responsible for precisely what meanings? There is only one direction to turn for the answers to these questions: south.

V. SOUTHBOUND Symbolic meaning presupposes the existence of a relatively stable interpretive context or tradition, but as we have seen, the exploration narrative of Poe’s day was a singularly unstable mixture of divided motives and conflicting discourses. Works by Benjamin Morrell and Jeremiah Reynolds allay this confusion by means of a transcendent nationalism, but The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym cannot do the same, in part because of the way Poe has positioned his text between “the degrading spirit of utilitarianism” and the “sublimated, the too French enthusiasm of Lamartine.” In the end, Poe fails to unify the discourses of commerce and of race, and ultimately his exploration narrative comes into conflict with the form’s emerging social function. The reason for this, I would suggest, is that The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym traverses not only different discursive modes but also different modes of production: Northern “utilitarian” manufacturing and “sublime” southern slavery.59 As

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indicated in the previous section, proslavery apologists such as Drayton and Paulding used sublimely terrifying accounts from African exploration narratives to justify the Southern order, but when Poe tried to extract both terror and information from the island of Tsalal, he wrote himself in a dead end. That is, the deception practiced by Pym (and Poe himself) violates not only Southern conventions of honor but also the information protocols most often associated with the developing Northern economy.60 Marked as worthless in these moral and political economies, the subtle explorer manifests a strange affinity with his barbarous host. In the previous chapter, I argued that it is insufficient to characterize Poe as a “fire-eating” advocate of slavery, especially when such a characterization is drawn from a review that Poe didn’t write. Nor is it sufficient to use the misattribution as an excuse to sidestep the entire question.61 What should instead be emphasized is the difference between a political activist like Beverley Tucker, who justified slavery on the basis of the close emotional and paternal bonds that develop between master and slave, and a commercial writer like Poe, who was less an advocate of slavery than an occasional critic of abolitionism and, when it suited him, an augur of impending slave revolts. In the introductions to their respective editions of Pym, Sidney Kaplan and Harold Beaver see a similarity between the Tsalal episode and slavery in the United States, intimating—as have many others—that the ambush on Tsalal is meant to evoke actual slave uprisings. This is an intriguing suggestion, but it must also be recalled that organized treachery by South Sea natives was standard fare in exploration narratives. In the Voyage of the United States Frigate Potomac, Jeremiah Reynolds describes the bloody treachery that occurred near the Sumatran village of Quallah-Battoo, when the inhabitants attacked the crew of an American trading vessel ironically called the Friendship. (Reynolds also describes the subterfuge—disguising the Potomac as a merchant ship— through which the Americans gain their revenge.) Benjamin Morrell describes a more sensational episode of treachery on the aptly named Massacre Islands. Morrell’s text is especially important, for as Burton Pollin and others have shown, there are numerous similarities between the Tsalal episode in Pym and the account of the Massacre Islands in A Narrative of Four Voyages. Morrell’s ship, the Antarctic, drops anchor off the coast of an island where (like the Jane Guy) they expect to trade for biche de mer and other commodities. The natives, who are “nearly as dark-skinned as Africans” (395), quickly assemble in canoes around the ship, displaying “the usual symptoms of curiosity, wonder, and timidity.” The “sable chief,” whom Morrell calls Nero, is invited on board along with his “sable attendants” (396). Morrell shows them a mirror, which produces the same effect as in Pym (terror and bewilderment). As in Pym, a delegation of the crew then travels to the village of the chief, where gifts of a knife and scissors excite “universal admiration” from the natives (in Pym, the gift of a knife gives Too-wit “unlimited satisfaction”). In the village, the natives

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are curious about “so wonderful a phenomenon” as Morrell’s white skin; when Nero tries and fails to rub the white color off of Morrell’s skin, it produces general astonishment. Pym has similar experiences, without the touching: “It was quite evident that they had never before seen any of the white race—from whose complexion, indeed, they appeared to recoil” (PT, 1137). Pym of course misreads the recoil of the natives, but this reveals a familiar pattern: the crew of the Jane Guy and the crew of the Antarctic both allow themselves to be lulled into complacency. Suffice it to say that a portion of Morrell’s crew, on the island to cure the biche de mer, fall victim to a “diabolical scheme of treachery” (413). There are still further similarities between Poe’s Tsalal and Morrell’s Massacre Islands, but the slave-revolt thesis proposed by Beaver and others is nevertheless worth pursuing, if only because a little historicism is a dangerous thing. In the previous chapter, I have documented most of Poe’s writings on slavery, but I have reserved one statement for consideration here because it explicitly refers to a slave insurrection. The statement in question appears in Poe’s September 1836 review of Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee: In his character of Nigger Tom, [the narrator] gives us some very excellent chapters upon abolition and the exciting effects of incendiary pamphlets and pictures, among our slaves in the South. This part of the narrative closes with a spirited picture of a negro insurrection, and with the hanging of Nigger Tom.62

What stands out in this account is not only the casual tone, but also the connection between literacy and insurrection. The connection should come as no surprise, because both slaves and slaveholders were deeply aware of the social power that accompanied the ability to read and write. Frederick Douglass, who may have shared the Baltimore streets with Poe, and who escaped to New York City in the same year that Pym was published there, describes in his autobiography the perilous process of acquiring forbidden newspapers and of learning to read. As Douglass explains, his master’s fear of literacy was itself “a new and special revelation, explaining . . . the pathway from slavery to freedom.”63 Advocates of slavery likewise viewed literacy as a precursor to freedom and rebellion. Paulding argued that education only made slaves unhappy with their lot, and Drayton complained that abolitionist pamphlets sent though the U.S. Mail had “overspread the South as a pestilence.” In the November 1837 Southern Literary Messenger, William Gilmore Simms demonstrated the magnitude of southern suspicion when he accused abolitionists of printing their incendiary newspapers on the kind of cotton material reserved for slave clothing and insinuating bales of this cloth into the southern market.64 Though neither Poe nor Simms mentions it directly, the fear of incendiary literature grew in part out of the 1831 Southampton County Insurrection led by Nat Turner. Sensational newspaper accounts of the time emphasized not

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only that Turner could read and write, but also that whites had no forewarning of the revolt even though it had been planned under their noses. In a sense, then, what was really terrifying was not the violence of the insurrection but the fact that slaves had organized themselves in secret.65 This white fear of autonomous or secret black signification helps to explain the intensity of Pym’s invective. Pym denounces the natives not only because they are violent, bloodthirsty wretches, but most of all because they are deceitful. Having been completely duped by the false congeniality of the natives, he is completely stunned by the ambush. When the earth comes tumbling down upon him, Pym accordingly takes it as a sign that “the whole foundations of the solid globe were suddenly rent asunder, and that the day of universal dissolution was at hand” (PT, 1152). As demonstrated in the previous chapter, the fear of black signification was also fueled by foreign events. In the February 1836 Southern Literary Messenger, Lucian Minor reviewed the current status of Liberian literature. The review, which is itself a sort of exploration narrative, praises the rapid development of the nation of Liberia, where once “a tangled and pathless forest frowned in a silence unbroken save by the roar of wild beasts,” but where today English literature thrives, and with it “those comforts, virtues and pleasures which the existence of Literature necessarily implies.” According to Minor, literature serves as the leading indicator of social development, and the newspaper in particular constitutes “the most expressive sign of all.” Surprised as he is by the development of literary culture in Liberia, what really astounds Minor is the fact that the editors, printers and writers “are all colored people.”66 By emphasizing the literacy and literary achievements of the black colony, Minor gives an ominous and radical edge to what might have been a thoroughly patronizing review. As editor of the Messenger, Poe knew that the article might produce some outcry; acting on orders from the proprietor, he even deleted certain passages which were sure to offend Southern readers.67 Despite these efforts, the Augusta Chronicle objected that “Truly Southern people can have no curiosity whatever, in Liberian, alias Negro Literature!!”68 Early in his career, then, Poe was drawn into the struggle over American slavery, and importantly, the conflict took the form of a dispute over the capability of Liberians to produce a literature of their own and the ability of blacks in general to sustain an autonomous culture. But whereas Minor treated Liberian literature as a progressive development, Poe seems disturbed by the very prospect of black signification. As in his detective fiction, the author of Pym seems to view any kind of autonomous culture as a menace to the literary market and to his own ability to survive as a commercial writer. Unlike the white crowds in “Thou Art the Man” and “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” however, the black islanders of Tsalal cannot be saved, or educated, or otherwise controlled by an imperial culture. As Pym emphasizes throughout his account, the islanders are by nature “the most wicked, hypocritical, vindictive,

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bloodthirsty, and altogether fiendish race of men upon the face of the globe” (PT, 1174). In other words, whereas Lucian Minor saw Liberian writers as the harbingers of civilization, Poe portrays the islanders of Tsalal, and by implication all black signifiers, as nothing more than subtle barbarians. But what does it mean when such barbarism comes at the climax of an imaginary voyage, especially one masquerading as an American exploration narrative? Unfortunately, this crucial question has been left unanswered by the first wave of interpretations which see Tsalal as a simple racial allegory. Nor has a satisfactory explanation emerged from interpretations assuming that exploration narratives employ a rigid us/them dichotomy. As suggested above, I am maintaining a different position: instead of simply reflecting a broad distinction between an American “us” and a foreign “them,” exploration narratives construct—or lend themselves to the construction of—contradictory versions of “them” which correspond to antagonistic positions in a national struggle over production, namely the struggle over the continuation or gradual elimination of slavery. This is illustrated by the conflicting representations of Liberia in texts available to Poe. Although Lucian Minor praises the achievements of the Liberians, William Drayton claims that Liberia demonstrates not the competence of free blacks but rather “the invincible aversion of the negro to regular labor” (243). More importantly, proslavery writers used sublimely terrifying passages from African exploration narratives to demonstrate the necessity and even the benevolence of the Southern order, claiming that American slavery represented an improvement for blacks. In Slavery in the United States, Paulding quotes several lurid passages from Mungo Park concerning the brutality of African chiefs, and then he asks, “Shall we waste our sympathies on such remorseless barbarians, or weep that so many of their victims have found refuge in the United States from such freedom as this?” (237). Paulding, incidentally, also suggests that American slavery would improve the lot of English and Irish workers: “the working-men of those philanthropic countries might, if they knew the real state of the case, flock hither in thousands, and sell themselves to the planters of the South” (255). It should be noted that Paulding and Drayton drew heavily from narratives of African exploration by British writers, and that these writers were disposed, as Mary Louise Pratt has shown, to view Africa through the lens of British colonialism. But the United States did not have the same colonial agenda, and this difference is frequently reflected in exploration narratives by American writers. Morrell, for instance, denounces the African slave trade and praises Liberia; in the process he cites (as does Lucian Minor) the Liberia Herald as evidence of an advanced degree of civilization (324–31). He also describes his proposal for trade with Africa: By penetrating the interior forty or fifty miles from the coast, which may be done with perfect safety, and without the slightest personal risk, thousands of fine fat

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cattle may be purchased for as many toys, and the bargain consummated under the guns of your vessel. The natives are honest and inoffensive; being in a state of nature, and having never studied the arts of deceitful villainy which are practised so successfully by the children of civilization. (287)

Apparently without ironic intent, Morrell propounds a theory of natural virtue which, by implication, impugns the integrity of his own commercial venture. The Africans may be innocent of “deceitful villainy,” but what of the traders who purchase cattle for “toys” and who conclude the exchange “under the guns” of their vessel? Deficient as he is in self-awareness, Morrell nevertheless understands that his American investors are interested in quick commercial profits, not in formal colonial occupation, for such occupation would require the full governmental backing of the home country. And indeed, what is the point of colonial occupation when the natives can be cheated so efficiently by simple commerce? Morrell’s comment demonstrates the importance of knowing the precise context of nationalist utterances and the actual methods for national expansion or aggrandizement in a specific place and time. In regard to nineteenthcentury America, expansionism is often discussed under the rubric of Manifest Destiny, the doctrine that advocated the acquisition—through conquest or purchase—of western lands until the nation extended all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Westward expansion invariably aggravated tensions between free and slave states, for new territories would either allow or forbid slavery, and when these territories became states it would shift the Congressional balance of power one way or another. Hence the history of westward expansion is the history of failed compromises over slavery; the Northwest Ordinance, the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act all seemed to defer the conflict rather than settle it. Not surprisingly, the momentous significance of Manifest Destiny has overshadowed other forms of imperialism that had less to do with contiguous territorial expansion than with far-flung commercial ventures beyond the North Atlantic. One obvious example is the colonial imperialism practiced by Britain and a host of European nations; this generally involved military and administrative control over a colony as a means to exploit its resources and markets. In the nineteenth century, however, many advanced countries were also practicing a kind of noncolonial economic expansion referred to as informal or commercial imperialism. Military force still played a role, but instead of full-scale armed occupation, an occasional gunboat was relied upon to enforce “free trade” or to protect merchants when deals went sour. This second, commercial form of imperialism comprises the ideological subtext of narratives by both Reynolds and Morrell. Recognizing the relative deficiencies of U.S. Naval power, Reynolds and Morrell did not advocate full-scale colonial occupation of South America and the Pacific Rim. Instead, they sought to encourage enough of an

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official U.S. presence—military, diplomatic, and scientific—to make these regions safe for trade. Unfortunately, literary studies of Poe have neglected the differences between colonial and commercial imperialism. John Carlos Rowe, for example, has argued that Poe was a supporter of Britain’s colonial occupation of India, and Dana Nelson, in a more nuanced reading, has explored Pym’s “colonial ideology” as well as his presumed “complicity and profit in the colonial enterprise.”69 Several points should be noted in this regard. First, even in his official editorial voice, Poe expressed doubts about Manifest Destiny; in his review of Reynolds, for example, Poe suggests that territorial expansion to the Pacific “may not be desirable” (ER, 1231). Second, by assuming that only colonialism counts as imperial domination, one runs the risk of neglecting the kind of average, intrinsic exploitation that Marx and others have imputed to capitalism. As I have argued in Chapter Three and elsewhere, Poe’s daily struggles in the publishing industry gave him a keen insight into the intrinsic problems of capitalism; this insight was perhaps all that Poe needed to question the opposition between savagery and “civilized” commerce. Finally, “colonialism” does not accurately describe the expedition supported by Jeremiah Reynolds and Poe himself. As demonstrated by the letter from Paulding to Wilkes, the United States Exploring Expedition was actually designed to promote an empire of commerce: It is the nature of the savage, long to remember benefits, and never to forget injuries; and you will use your best endeavours wherever you may go, to leave behind a favorable impression of your country and countrymen. The Expedition is not for conquest, but discovery. Its objects are all peaceful; they are to extend the empire of commerce and science; to diminish the hazards of the ocean; and point out to future navigators a course by which they may avoid dangers and find safety. (227)

One form of imperialism can obviously lead to another, but Morrell, Reynolds and even Paulding seem to have tailored their descriptions of “savages” to the exigencies of an informal commercial empire. Thus in Paulding’s pro-slavery writings, Africans are utterly debased, but in his Expedition orders, savages respond to courtesy and remember benefits conferred. Paulding also thinks that the natives may be capable of learning the rudiments of ownership and exchange. This is why he avoids calling the natives incorrigible thieves, instead suggesting that they possess “vague ideas of the rights of property” (226). In his capacity as Secretary of the Navy, in other words, Paulding believed that the natives could be rendered fit for commerce, especially under the guns of an American ship. Significantly, even the celebrated incidents of treachery in Reynolds and Morrell confirm this model of the trainable savage. Reynolds specifically states that the Potomac attacked Quallah-Battoo so that “nothing should be left undone to leave an indelible impression on the minds of these people, of the

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power of the United States to inflict punishment for aggressions committed on her commerce” (121). At the conclusion of the attack, Reynolds and the naval officers are satisfied that they have cleared up the natives’ “misconceptions” about free trade (124). Morrell also finds that force is a wonderful aid to commerce and enlightenment. Immediately after leaving the Massacre Islands, the Antarctic heads to New Guinea, where the natives are quicker to learn the basic principles of imperial economics: “When the natives are once convinced that pilfering is out of the question, and that the vessel is perfectly secure from their attacks, they will immediately turn their attention to trade, and will soon furnish a cargo that cannot fail of yielding unheard-of profits” (461). In the narratives of Reynolds and Morrell, then, the natives practice treachery in moderation: untrustworthy enough to require an occasional show of force, they are nevertheless capable of conforming to the empire of commerce. Poe’s natives, however, are treacherous beyond all bounds. In the Tsalal episode, Poe is so intent on creating a terrifying adventure that he seems to forget about the economic work of the exploration narrative, namely the actual or apparent transmission of profitable information. As indicated earlier, this absence of information would violate the primary purpose of an expeditionary voyage. In a passage reproduced by Poe for the Southern Literary Messenger, Jeremiah Reynolds laments that the United States would use “knowledge furnished by others, to teach us how to shun a rock, escape a shoal, or find a harbor, and add nothing to the great mass of information that previous ages and other nations have brought to our hands” (ER, 1232). At the very moment when the narrative should remedy this deficiency, and thereby fulfil Pym’s promise to reveal exciting scientific discoveries, Poe depicts a benighted race of savages who purvey what we today call disinformation. To understand the significance of this substitution, it is necessary to consider political economy in its broadest sense, and to think not just of black signification but more specifically of signifyin’. As Henry Louis Gates argues in Figures in Black, “signifying” is a common trope of the black vernacular tradition which involves, among other things, the technique of repeating with a difference and a trouble-making tendency to insinuate and deceive. Importantly, the trope itself works to subvert any social order which maintains its dominance by relying on knowledge which is separated or alienated from its original producer. For this reason, it is utterly antagonistic to the project of accumulating scientific data or commercially useful meaning. As Gates indicates, “signifying is a rhetorical act that is not engaged in the game of information giving.”70 Signifying, or any cultural practice that fails to valorize capital, would clearly subvert what Poe and Reynolds acknowledge to be the official function of the exploration narrative. Since the Tsalal episode occurs when the narrative should deliver commercially useful knowledge, and since Poe more or less explicitly inscribes race in the seam between the sublime and the bottom line, we must inquire into the value of racism to a developing capitalist economy

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and an expanding world market. Obviously, the ideology of racism would be enormously useful in justifying the military accompaniment to economic imperialism. In addition, it should be recalled that Reynolds and many other antebellum Americans took the ideology of racism as a kind of science; this explains why Reynolds thought that a scientific expedition should acquire “intimate knowledge . . . of the nature, habits and character of all races of men.” Given these circumstances, the travel writer, and especially the composer of imaginary voyages, would be sorely tempted to offer ideologically consistent fabrications in lieu of first-hand observations. But what Poe offers in the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is a kind of gutted or politically dysfunctional version of racism: his blacks, who at times seem more allegorical than African, conform to neither the paternal racism of most slavery advocates nor to the “trainable savage” paradigm of Reynolds and Morrell. Like Monk Lewis, Poe seems to have made his natives black primarily for “effect.” In many respects, this is perfectly consistent with the political diffidence discussed in the previous chapter. Having learned from John Allan and from the success of the penny press that divisive political questions were inimical to the formation of a mass market, Poe generally avoided referring to the more controversial issues of the day.71 But this only returns us to the crucial problem of nationalism in antebellum America, for the incidents on Tsalal, and the form of Pym in general, suggest the enormous difficulty of developing a mass literary market in a country divided between North and South. In this light, Poe’s derogation of “the degrading spirit of utilitarianism” is perplexing, especially since he often treated commerce as the only force binding the nation and the national audience together. This much is demonstrated by Poe’s favorable reviews of Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine. A typical issue of the Merchants’ Magazine ran stories on “The Government and the Currency,” “The Steamship Great Britain,” “Copper-Smelting in the U.S.,” “Indigo and the Indigo Trade,” “Railroads East and West,” and “Mineral Resources of Missouri.” On several occasions Poe explicitly commends the magazine for its “perfect nationality.” Freeman Hunt, Poe observes, “is neither a Northern, a Southern, an Eastern or a Western man. He is an inhabitant of the United States—if you please, an Alleghanian. He speaks to the whole people—and very effectively, because usefully, to all.”72 In search of a mass audience, Poe likewise saw profit in trying to speak like an Alleghanian. Aside from avoiding regional references in his fiction, Poe sought to give his literary theories a certain commercial or scientific rigor. Responding in 1835 to charges that “Berenice” was a tale in bad taste, Poe told his editor that “the effect—if any—will be estimated better by the circulation of the Magazine than by any comments upon its contents.”73 Later, he sought to extend the rational basis for criticism, in part to combat the cultural and economic power of the Northeastern literary cliques which, in Poe’s view, treated outsiders as “barbarians” (ER, 820). From the vantage point of a Southern writer, these coteries must have seemed as insidious as the

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natives on Tsalal. Denouncing their widespread practice of “puffing” favorite authors, Poe instead emphasized the rationale of verse and the science of the single effect. Though often skeptical about science and commerce, Poe clearly believed that a greater reliance on rational principles could overcome regional prejudices and thereby assist a writer from the hinterlands. Indeed, as demonstrated in Chapter Two, Poe displays his strongest nationalism when he perceives a threat to the rights of authors or to the general prospects for a national literary market. And yet, Pym is almost completely devoid of a unifying nationalism, even though the exploration narrative was the perfect vehicle to express a “perfect nationality.” As mentioned above, both Morrell and Reynolds invoke nationalism in multiple ways: by constructing or interpellating their (ideal) readers as patriotic Americans; by representing science as a kind of international contest with American pride at stake; by lobbying the federal government to “do its part” in supporting the heroic efforts of American merchants and sailors; and by reminding those far from sea of the enormous (albeit indirect) economic benefits conferred by voyages and expeditions. In his reviews of Reynolds, Poe makes many of the same arguments. Most importantly, he quotes Jeremiah Reynolds’s exalted account of nationalism as a sublime, transcendent good: Indeed, the enterprize, courage and perseverance of American seamen are, if not unrivalled, at least unsurpassed. What man can do, they have always felt ready to attempt,—what man has done, it is their character to feel able to do,—whether it be to grapple with an enemy on the deep, or to pursue their gigantic game under the burning line, with an intelligence and ardor that insure success, or pushing their adventurous barks into the high southern latitudes, to circle the globe within the Antarctic circle, and attain the pole itself; yea, to cast anchor on that point where all meridians terminate, where our eagle and star-spangled banner may be unfurled and planted, and left to wave on the axis of earth itself!—where, amid the novelty, grandeur and sublimity of the scene, the vessels, instead of sweeping a vast circuit by the diurnal movements of the earth, would simply turn round once in twenty-four hours! . . . If this should be realized, where is the individual who does not feel that such an achievement would add new lustre to the annals of American philosophy, and crown with a new and imperishable wreath the nautical glories of our country! (Reynolds, Pacific and Indian Oceans, 99; ER, 1247–48)

Of all the nationalist encomiums in nineteenth-century exploration narratives, this must stand as the preeminent example of a sublimated, too American enthusiasm. Originally delivered at the close of Reynolds’s Address in the halls of Congress, it provides a stark contrast to the conclusions of such narratives as Moby-Dick and Pym, both of which depart conspicuously from Reynolds’s optimistic patriotism. There is a further contrast within Poe’s own work, for nationalism receives a more positive treatment in his nonfictional reviews than in his fictional nar-

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ratives. In his reviews, Poe endorses and even mimics Reynolds’s sublimated nationalism, praising the expedition as a means to “remove the reproach of our country” and to “build up for us a name in nautical discovery commensurate with our moral, political, and commercial position among the nations of the earth” (ER, 1237). But when Poe converts such expeditions into fiction, nationalism is the first casualty. Thus the celebrated expedition of Lewis and Clark is upstaged by a rag-tag band consisting of Julius Rodman, a man of French-Canadian descent named Pierre Junôt, his slave Toby, five Canadians, five brothers from Kentucky, and several others, all of whom are willing to sacrifice “interest” in favor of “idle amusement” at every opportunity (PT, 1237). The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym comprises an even greater assault on nationalist pretensions, for Pym gathers much of his scientific information while sailing aboard a British ship, even though the British were viewed as the arch-rivals of the American economy and of American commercial imperialism. As Kinley Brauer has shown, resistance to British commercial dominance was in fact the driving force behind a wide range of economic, diplomatic, and military initiatives between 1815 and 1860. John Quincy Adams, for example, viewed British colonial policy as “nothing less than a commercial conspiracy against the United States,” and Henry Clay propounded his “American System” for economic development partly as a response to British economic supremacy. According to Clay, this supremacy condemned the United States to be “a sort of independent colonies of England—politically free, commercially slaves.”74 The United States Exploring Expedition was also touted as a remedy to this situation. In lobbying for the expedition, Jeremiah Reynolds complained that American merchant ships suffered “insults and depredations” at the hands of the imperial powers of Europe; elsewhere, he singled out the British as “our grand competitors.”75 In Pym, Poe nevertheless destroys the American merchant ship in the first part of the narrative, and in what follows, a British ship reaps all the commercial and scientific rewards of the southern voyage (up until the apocalyptic moment of treachery, that is). The ending of Pym, moreover, seems to abandon altogether the nationalist or imperialist agenda associated with American exploration narratives. Rejecting the transcendent nationalism of Reynolds, who dreamed of unfurling the American flag at the point where “all meridians terminate,” Poe substitutes “a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men” whose skin matches “the perfect whiteness of the snow.” Interpretations of this white figure are legion, but in regard to the ideology of Pym, the positive meaning of the ending matters less than its negative implications. In other words, by shifting so dramatically to an oneiric, mythical, or divine realm, Poe abandons every pragmatic value emphasized by Paulding, Reynolds, Morrell, and a host of other writers. This is even more clear when one considers that explorers were searching for docile, ignorant, and preferably dark trading partners, not

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a mysterious and transcendent white being.76 The purported divinity of the figure only underscores Pym’s fall from nationalism, for it suggests that in the latter portions of the narrative, the sublime sanction for exploration is not country but God. In an era when criticism stakes so much on an author’s alleged beliefs, it is perhaps necessary to decree that although Poe may have been an average racist, he was at best an indifferent imperialist. This deficient imperialism stems in part from Poe’s willingness to confront the inherent—and often deliberate—confusion between fact and fiction in exploration narratives, for although The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym can take on the appearance of profitable information, it cannot function as information itself. Poe effectively acknowledges this through his changing representation of the southern “field.” In one of his 1836 reviews, Poe lobbies for Reynolds’s expedition by depicting the South Pacific as “a vast field for national enterprise” (ER, 1229). In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe initially emphasizes the excitement of the quest for new knowledge, describing the antarctic as a “wide field . . . for discovery” (PT, 1129). But by the end of the voyage, Poe has shifted his emphasis from secular commerce to divine signification, and he abandons the economic design of exploration when he beholds the strange figures traced on the wall of the Tsalal chasm. The concluding “Note” to the narrative deciphers these figures as Arabic or Egyptian words, and then claims that such decodings are themselves sufficient to “open a wide field for speculation and exciting conjecture” (PT, 1181). As indicated by the increasingly rarefied progression from “national enterprise” to international “discovery” to unearthly “conjecture,” the hoax of useful information must ultimately come to an unproductive end. When it does, Poe confronts the same problem he started with, namely impossibility of expressing a “perfect nationality.” The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, after all, tells of a voyage to an imaginary South, not to an industrializing and ever-expanding North. Unlike Freeman Hunt, Poe cannot speak usefully to “the whole people.” Nor can he articulate a single ideology uniting North and South, for as the Civil War would later demonstrate, fundamental economic and political contradictions prevented the two regions from dreaming the same imperial dream. And indeed, the sectional antagonisms first aroused by westward expansion grew even more intense in the decade following Poe’s death, when slaveholders turned their imperial gaze to the south. Attitudes toward southward expansion were not neatly divided along sectional lines, but in the 1850s many Southerners began to envision an empire stretching into Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean islands. Thus John Quitman’s plan to annex Cuba and William Walker’s “filibustering” forays into Nicaragua were part of a grand design to create an empire for slavery. As Senator Albert Gallatin Brown told his Mississippi constituents, “I want Cuba . . . I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same

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reason—for the planting or spreading of slavery. And a foothold in Central America will powerfully aid us in acquiring those other States. . . . Yes, I want these Countries for the spread of slavery.”77 Other ideologues emphasized the visionary aspects of expansion, depicting Caribbean colonization as the Southern version of Manifest Destiny. Edward Pollard, who ultimately became one of the chief historians of the Confederacy, made the case for a uniquely Southern imperialism in 1859: In tropical America we may see an empire as powerful and gorgeous as ever was pictured in our dreams of history . . . an empire . . . representing the noble peculiarities of Southern civilization. . . . The destiny of Southern Civilization is to be consummated in a glory brighter even than that of old.78

Clearly, this marks a radical departure from Jeremiah Reynolds’s vision of an informal empire based on commerce. It also marks the final demise of Reynolds’s dream of a transcendent nationalism, for instead of binding the nation together, Southern plans for expansion into the tropics signaled the impending destruction of the Union. Due to Northern resistance and a lack of Southern resources, these plans failed to come to fruition in the 1850s. By 1861, of course, the time for expansion was over. In the words of Robert May, “the South’s grandiose vision of empire dissolved in the blood of war.”79 How strangely prescient, then, is the Southern voyage of Edgar Allan Poe. Despite his familiarity with the commercial dreams of Reynolds and Morrell, Poe abandons all hope of unity on the nightmarish island of Tsalal. Aside from dimming the prospects for a perfect nationalism, Tsalal demonstrates the impossibility of integrating everyone into the “informational orders” of commerce and science. By the end of the episode, it is clear that the blacks of Tsalal would fit neither the paternal paradigm of Beverley Tucker nor the liberal paradigm of Lucian Minor. Tsalal could never provide docile and trustworthy laborers for a slave economy, nor could it, like the new nation of Liberia, assume a productive place among the civilized nations which constitute the world market. Importantly, Poe himself seemed hesitant to assume his place in a signifying environment where information had become the dominant form of meaning. Like the Tsalal natives, the author of Pym inclines unrelentingly toward subtlety. The story begins with Pym wondering whether he can lend his statements “the appearance of truth” (PT, 1007), and it ends with an imaginary editor conveying Poe’s “disbelief in the entire truth of the later portions of the narration” (PT, 1180). In addition, Pym confesses to practicing the same kind of deception which he so vehemently denounces in the islanders of Tsalal. Early in the narrative, Pym admits that “I have . . . examined my conduct . . . with sentiments of displeasure. . . . The intense hypocrisy I made use of for the furtherance of my project—an hypocrisy pervading every word and action of my life for so long a period of time—could only have been rendered tolerable

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to myself by . . . my long-cherished visions of travel” (PT, 1019). Finally, there are the numerous instances of apparent irony in which Poe seems to mock or undercut his narrator. Pym, for example, blindly misunderstands the natives’ reaction to whiteness, Too-Wit’s pleasure at being presented with the gift of a knife, the significance of the chasms where he takes refuge after the ambush, and indeed, the meaning of the writing on the wall. As J. Gerald Kennedy has observed, “if Pym exhibits colonialist racism he is also portrayed, unmistakably, as a fool who cannot decipher the most obvious signs and portents. In this sense his political consciousness must be distinguished from Poe’s.” 80 In questioning the judgment and motives of his civilized narrator, Poe to some extent follows the model of reversibility set forth in the liberal exploration narratives of Morrell and Reynolds. Morrell, for example, praises the honesty of African herdsmen and describes “deceitful villainy” as an art practiced primarily by “the children of civilization.”81 On several occasions, Reynolds also overturns the opposition between savagery and civilization. In a note to his Address, Reynolds discusses a number of outrages committed by merchant and whaling vessels upon blameless natives. Reynolds, like Paulding, emphasizes the retribution that such violence incurs: “What feeling could such coldblooded butchery generate but a fierce thirst for revenge, to be wreaked on the first white man who should fall within their grasp?” In Reynolds’s view, however, the cycle of revenge raises larger questions about civilized behavior and Naval policy: [I]t becomes apparent that an efficient naval force is required in the South and Pacific Seas, not only for the greater safety of our commerce, and as a check upon the savages, but for another reason, viz., to protect the latter against the wanton cruelty of men claiming the appellation of civilized. (68; italics in original)

Unlike Reynolds and Morrell, Poe never ascribes virtuous sentiments to the natives on Tsalal. But he does undercut the pretensions of his civilized characters. The mutiny on the Grampus, for example, is accompanied by acts of extreme barbarism, and when starvation afflicts Pym and the remaining survivors, they are reduced to the “last horrible extremity” of cannibalism. In the Tsalal episode, Poe illustrates the inherent dishonesty of commercial expeditions such as that of the Jane Guy. He does this primarily by emphasizing the disparity between the words and intentions of the white crew; though surely their deceit does not equal that of the natives, it is similar in nature. When the white men first arrive at the village, for example, they stick close to the chief, resolving to “sacrific[e] him immediately upon the first appearance of hostile design.” With this resolution still fresh in their minds, Captain Guy assures Too-wit of their “eternal friendship and goodwill.” Then, immediately after contemplating homicide and professing eternal friendship, the white men commence “a series of cross-questioning in every ingenious manner we could

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devise, with a view of discovering what were the chief productions of the country, and whether any of them might be turned to profit” (PT, 1145). There are deeper links between commerce and barbarism. For one thing, the commercial machinations of Captain Guy are nothing compared to the duplicity of Poe himself, who seems to take inordinate delight in purveying his “impudent and ingenious fiction” (PT, 1007) as an authentic exploration narrative. And as Poe surely realized, the ambiguous nature of exploration narratives only increased profits for the Brothers Harper, who published the works of Stephens, Morrell, and Reynolds, as well as pirated editions of narratives by British explorers. Aside from controlling the content of these texts, Harpers sought to control public reception through a network of editors and reviewers who collaborated in “puffing” selected publications. Poe of course won some fame for attacking this conspiracy of false reviewers. With indignation rivaling that of Pym, Poe denounced “the machinations of coteries in New York— coteries which, at the bidding of leading booksellers, manufacture, as required from time to time, a pseudo-public opinion by wholesale” (ER, 1007). Like Pym, however, Poe sometimes practiced the kind of collective deception he denounced in others. The secret plotting by the natives of Tsalal, for example, looks very much like the model for Poe’s plan to overcome the exploitation of writers by the publishing industry. In several letters to the very James Russell Lowell who later treated Southern writers as “barbarians,” Poe argued that nothing would change until a coalition of writers banded together to seize control of American letters. As demonstrated in Chapter Three, Poe’s earlier magazine ventures hinged upon his ability to attract “a partner possessing ample capital, and, at the same time, so little self-esteem, as to allow me entire control of the editorial conduct” (Letters, 1:224). By 1844, however, Poe was conspiring to create a magazine through a “radically different” strategy, which would eliminate all dependence on a wealthy proprietor. “Suppose,” Poe writes, “that the élite of our men of letters should combine secretly.” Some would contribute capital, some would contribute articles, and one of their number would serve as editor. Poe believed that a magazine “set on foot by a coalition . . . would be irresistible,” and that American writers really had no other way to escape from being eaten alive by the large magazine publishers. “If we do not defend ourselves by some such coalition,” he warns, “we shall be devoured, without mercy, by the Godeys, the Snowdens, et id genus omne” (Letters, 1:247). In the end Poe could only realize such coalitions in a fictive and negative form. The treacherous savages on Tsalal may enjoy a communal signifying environment where knowledge is no commodity, but for the civilized Pym there is no escape from the laws of political economy. As demonstrated by the fitful course of his journey, Pym’s visions remain haunted by capital’s relentless quest for new information and by its equally relentless reorganization of

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the signifying environment. If the violence of this reorganization impelled Poe to adopt a sustained strategy of ambiguity, it does not mean, as Jean Ricardou suggests, that a figurative whiteness must be the final destination of every exploration narrative. Instead, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym implies that signification can never free itself from prevailing social antagonisms, and that antebellum texts register not only the cultural centrality of racism but also the less obvious movement toward a single, predominant capitalist society that would demand useful information from even an imaginary voyage. In addition to playing upon the fears of black deception, then, the episode on Tsalal reveals the intimate conflict between the rise of information as a dominant form of meaning and Poe’s recurrent dream of texts that could elude capitalist regulation. Such texts would include utterances in the primal human tongue, words graven directly on the earth, or even tales published in a magazine controlled by authors alone. Poe’s abortive plots to emancipate writing suggest that conflicts between utilitarian and sublime perspectives are linked to more fundamental social conditions. From the standpoint of capital, in other words, every emancipated signifier is an idle hand, just as from the standpoint of the natives, every capitalist is a subtle barbarian.

PART THREE MASS CULTURE


Chapter Seven THE CODE FOR GOLD POE AND CRYPTOGRAPHY A writer must have the fullest belief in his statements, or must simulate that belief perfectly, to produce an absorbing interest in the mind of his reader. That power of simulation can only be possessed by a man of high genius. (Poe reviewing himself, October 1845) Suppose I could make people believe that I have mountains of gold, then I could arrive at the same end as if I really had that gold. . . . This power, though, is only imaginary. If not recognized by other men, it doesn’t exist. (B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre)1 If you have looked over the Von Kempelen article which I left with your brother, you will have fully perceived its drift. I mean it as a kind of “exercise,” or experiment, in the plausible or verisimilar style. Of course there is not one word of truth in it from beginning to end. I thought that such a style, applied to the gold-excitement, could not fail of effect. (Poe to Evert Duyckinck, March 8, 1849)

N

EAR THE END of Poe’s best-selling tale “The Gold-Bug,” William Legrand explains what inspired the quest that led him from an old piece of parchment to the climactic recovery of Captain Kidd’s buried treasure. According to Legrand, he realized that he had stumbled upon a coded pirate letter written in invisible ink when he accidentally discovered a death’s head “signature” at the bottom of the seemingly blank parchment. Intrigued by the significant absence of signs, he then set out to recover the body of the letter or, in his phrase, “the text for my context” (PT, 585). Legrand therefore engages in a kind of reverse historicism, and his quest serves as a critique—or parody—of those interpretive approaches which proceed in the opposite direction by exploring the historical context of a text that is already visible. In a somewhat different spirit, this chapter also seeks to brush historicism against the grain, first by recounting the political and economic context of a tale that explicitly celebrates the contrary practice of decoding, and then

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by investigating how Poe turns cryptography, a method of concealing information, into a device for selling “without sympathy” to an anonymous mass audience. Not surprisingly, such a project makes use of the very techniques it criticizes, for in the course of historicizing “The Gold-Bug” I decode a hitherto unsolved Poe cryptogram, thereby producing yet another text for interpretation. But this double method of decoding and historicizing does not aim to make the work of interpretation even more burdensome. It is instead designed to expedite this work by exposing the complicitous relations among capitalism, cryptography, and the rise of a mass culture in antebellum America.

I. CONTEXTS In 1811, the itinerant actress Elizabeth Poe died in Richmond, and her infant son Edgar was taken in by John and Frances Allan. In the same year, the mercantile firm headed by John Allan and Charles Ellis confronted a different sort of crisis. From their offices in Richmond, Ellis and Allan had been paying close attention to Congressional debates over proposals to renew the charter of the national bank. Like most merchants, they looked to the bank to provide a stable national currency, and when the charter was rejected, they solemnly informed customers that “The fate of the U. States Bank seems to be decided. . . . We consider the existence of that institution at an end.”2 Just five years later, however, the institution returned as the Second Bank of the United States. The resurrected bank played a major role in the business affairs of Ellis and Allan throughout Poe’s childhood. Later, when Poe was struggling to become a commercial writer, the Bank played a major role in the political affairs of the nation and especially in the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829–37). Later still, at a time when Poe was seeking a government patronage job, the mere idea of a national bank prompted a crisis in the Whig Party and the near collapse of the presidency of John Tyler (1841–45). In all likelihood, Poe’s upbringing in the opinionated and financially sophisticated Allan household would have made him dubious of partisan attempts to vilify banks, bankers, and especially banknotes (which served as a makeshift paper currency). When Poe published “The Gold-Bug” in 1843, he no doubt felt renewed disdain toward the debates over national monetary policy that had raged since Jackson’s election in 1828. Since Poe considered himself an expert on the law of supply and demand, he must have been tempted to satirize the passionate controversy over money and banking, just as he elsewhere satirized war-hero politicians and various forms of public gullibility.3 But instead of intervening on behalf of neoclassical economic prudence, Poe capitalized on the crisis by selling a “money tale” to the masses. The facts surrounding the publication of the tale further emphasize the link between literature and commerce. In March 1843 the Dollar Newspaper adver-

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tised a contest offering a $100.00 prize for the best story. Poe had an ideal story for the contest, but first he had to barter with George Graham, who had purchased it for $52.00.4 On 16 June, the Dollar announced that “The GoldBug” had won first place in the contest. The other award-winning stories indicate what the selection committee was looking for: second prize went to “The Banker’s Daughter” by Robert Morris, and third prize was awarded to “Marrying for Money.” In the literary marketplace, tales about money were intended to make money. Reviewing Samuel Warren’s Ten Thousand a Year, Poe noted in November 1841 that money is “a topic which comes home at least as immediately to the bosoms and business of mankind, as any which could be selected” (ER, 349). An 1845 review of “The Gold-Bug,” probably written by Poe himself, likewise contends that “the intent of the author was evidently to write a popular tale: money, and the finding of money being chosen as the most popular thesis” (ER, 869). The publishers of the Dollar also anticipated that money tales would be in demand, for in addition to selecting three stories with pecuniary themes, they went through the unusual step of copyrighting their firstprize story.5 As reported in the 22 June Public Ledger, “The Gold-Bug” did in fact sell briskly: A GREAT RUSH FOR THE PRIZE STORY!—As largely as the publishers provided for the supposed demand for “The Dollar Newspaper,” containing the prize story of “The Gold-Bug,” written by Mr. Poe, the rush to obtain the paper yesterday greatly exceeded their expectation, and there is every probability that they will have forthwith to republish it. (Poe Log, 419)

Not surprisingly, Poe would later emphasize the tale’s commercial success. A year after the contest, he told James Russell Lowell that more than 300,000 copies had been circulated, making it “my most successful tale” (Letters, 1:253). Two years after its publication, Poe claimed that both “The Gold-Bug” and “The Raven” had been written solely to sell: “‘The Raven’ has had a great ‘run’, Thomas—but I wrote it for the express purpose of running—just as I did the ‘Gold-Bug’, you know. The bird beat the bug, though, all hollow.”6 While not reliable indicators of Poe’s original intent, such retrospective comments do reveal his insight into the gross as well as the subtle determinants of literary production. Poe’s remarks also register an awareness of the widespread fascination with gold, money, and political economy. The age of Jackson witnessed both inflation and real economic growth as well as a bitter conflict over the constitutionality of the second Bank of the United States and the value of the notes it issued. Money, properly so called, consisted solely of gold and silver coin or specie, but the Bank of the United States (along with numerous state and independent banks) issued promissory notes that were backed by a varying percentage of specie reserves in the institution’s vaults. Due to economic necessity

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and high public confidence, these notes circulated much as paper money does today. Like the first national bank, however, the second Bank had only been granted temporary authority. Its charter was set to expire in 1836, and this made it vulnerable to diverse attacks, ranging from the agrarian charge that the “paper system” enriched aristocrats at the expense of producers, to the speculators’ claim that the Bank’s monetary policy unnecessarily restricted the money supply and thereby stood in the way of progress.7 As Marvin Meyers has persuasively demonstrated, the second Bank of the United States aroused so much criticism partly because it represented a concentration of economic power unprecedented in American history. It was also an anomalous new entity: though operating as a private corporation with private stockholders, the Bank’s charter made it the exclusive recipient of federal deposits, free of interest. Under the astute and ambitious command of Nicholas Biddle, the Bank quickly grew into a “giant” that “reached into every consequential place of commerce in the country.”8 During his second term in office, Andrew Jackson worked hard to transform Bank President Nicholas Biddle into a symbol of corrupt wealth and monopoly privilege. The rhetoric of the campaign against the Bank, fraught with references to democracy and “the common man,” must be viewed with skepticism, for despite their differences, Biddle and Jackson were both proponents of an expanding capitalist economy. Nevertheless, Jackson portrayed the Bank as a dangerous hydra-headed monster that poured public money into the private pockets of a few American and European stockholders. The so-called Bank War centered on the attempts of the Jackson administration to restrict the Bank’s power and to prevent it from obtaining a new charter. The controversy even reawakened an old dispute over the proper form of money itself; supporters of the “paper system” defended the right of banks (national, state, or both) to issue notes, whereas “hard-money men” advocated an ostensibly populist reliance on gold and silver coin. The leader of the hard-money faction was Democratic politician Thomas Hart Benton, whose extreme aversion to paper money earned him such nicknames as Old Bullion and the Gold Humbug. No one—and certainly no one in Poe’s predicament—could have ignored this vitriolic conflict over social class and monetary policy. The Bank War was, according to Robert Remini, “the single most important event of Jackson’s entire administration.”9 Shortly after Jackson was succeeded by Martin Van Buren, the country plunged into an economic depression. The Panic of 1837 was accompanied by a widespread loss of confidence in paper notes, which had already begun to lose their value due to inflation and the federal government’s refusal to accept anything other than gold or silver specie in payment for western lands. This financial crisis had immediate consequences for Poe. As editor of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, Poe had to deliver the bad economic news to other


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writers; in 1839 he told Joseph Snodgrass that “the intense pressure has obliged Mr. B[urton] with nearly, if not every, publisher of the country, to discontinue paying for contributions” (Letters, 1:121–22). Later he claimed that the bank suspensions forced him to postpone his own magazine project: My Magazine project is only deferred—“scotched not killed”. Every thing was prepared for its issue . . . when just as I was putting the first sheet to press—there came like a clap of thunder, the bank suspensions. No periodical could be commenced under such circumstances. . .10

This may be something of a rationalization, but Poe had so much labor invested in his magazine project that anything standing in its way would have shaken him like “a clap of thunder.” It is also worth noting that Poe sought assistance for his magazine from none other than Nicholas Biddle. In the fall of 1840, Poe visited the former Bank president at his country estate outside of Philadelphia. While there, he sold Biddle a four-year subscription to Penn Magazine and presented him with a signed copy of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (Poe Log, 311). A few months later, Poe asked Biddle to contribute an article, and therefore “caste,” to the first issue of Penn: “You will not accuse me of intending the meanness of flattery to serve as a selfish purpose, when I say that your name has an almost illimitable influence in the city, and a vast influence in all quarters of the country, and that, would you allow me its use as I propose, it would be of more actual value to me in my enterprise than perhaps a thousand dollars in money.”11 In a somewhat oblique manner, Poe tried to capitalize on the Bank War to further his magazine venture, and importantly, the strategy involved the conversion of a sign (Biddle’s name) into gold. The national political dispute over money and banking persisted through Van Buren’s presidency (1837–41) and flared up again dramatically during the administration of John Tyler, the running mate and successor of William Henry Harrison (who died just one month after his inauguration). Poe was paying close attention to the Tyler presidency when he composed “The GoldBug,” so a brief political history is in order. In the presidential election of 1840, the recently formed Whig Party assembled a ticket that was designed more to win the campaign than to implement a coherent platform. The presidential candidate—William Henry Harrison—was selected because he could be portrayed as the military hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe, while the vice presidential candidate—John Tyler of Virginia—was chosen to balance the ticket (geographically and perhaps ideologically). The campaign is today remembered for its poverty of issues as well as for the vapidness of its primary slogans: “Tippecanoe and Tyler too”; “Van, Van, the used-up man”; and “We will vote for Tyler therefore, without a why or wherefore.” If Harrison had lived, the Whigs might have been able to push through their real agenda,

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which closely followed Henry Clay’s “American System” of a national bank, protective tariffs, and internal improvements at national expense. But Harrison did not live, and Tyler—the first vice president to succeed upon the death of an elected president—was immediately dubbed “His Accidency.” This did not greatly enhance Tyler’s authority as president. His authority was further undermined by the fact that he opposed nearly everything sought by the majority of his party (led by Henry Clay). Befitting the subject of this chapter, the first confrontation between Tyler and the Clay Whigs involved fiscal policy. In 1841 Clay pushed a bill through Congress designed to resurrect a national bank. Tyler, a long-time advocate of states’ rights, vetoed Clay’s Fiscal Bank Act as an unconstitutional extension of federal power. Tyler’s veto caused an uproar among Clay’s supporters, and in a short time open hostilities erupted between the Congressional Whigs and the president they had helped to elect. The Bank War had resumed with a vengeance. Not surprisingly, the new Bank War reopened debates over the proper form of money. In the Madisonian, the official press organ of the Tyler administration, battle lines were drawn between those who viewed bank paper as a thing (i.e., as money) and those who viewed it as a sign (i.e., as currency). The Madisonian defined money as “metal coined for the purposes of commerce,” and obviously this excluded paper: Nothing can be more absurd that to talk about “hard” money, as though all metal was not hard; or of “paper” money, as though “paper” was a species of “metal,” instead of a vegetable substance. . . Paper is not metal; neither is money paper; though they have long been confounded, most confoundedly. Bank notes, or Bank issues, or Bank paper, or by whatever name Bank promises may be designated, is not, never was, nor can be, MONEY: though it may be a commercial “currency,” (which is a “circulation” of paper,) and a substitute for “MONEY,” or, more properly speaking, a token, a mark, or sign, in lieu of money—a mere counter in the great game of human commerce and civilization.12

As in “The Gold-Bug,” paper, signs, and metal comprise a kind of knot which must be untangled, but it is not clear that the Madisonian’s distinctions made any practical difference. The problem—for the Madisonian editorialist and for the Tyler administration—was that all this “proper speaking” about money meant very little when it came to monetary policy. The Madisonian editorial in fact concludes by proclaiming that “the great desideratum now is a CURRENCY for commercial and universal circulation, whose basis is MONEY—gold and silver.” In other words, the question for Tyler was not whether there would be paper currency, but how the federal government would regulate the association between the marks or signs of gold and gold itself. Unlike “Gold Humbugs” such as Thomas Hart Benton, then, Tyler did not object to paper currency per se. In a description of his Exchequer plan—


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offered as an alternative to a national bank—Tyler explained that the national government could no longer heed the theoretical disputes over the proper substance of money. As Tyler saw it, the choice between metallic specie and the “paper system” had already been made: I do not propose to enter into a comparative analysis of the merits of the two systems. Such belonged more properly to the period of the introduction of the paper system. The speculative philosopher might find inducements to prosecute the inquiry, but his researches could only lead him to conclude that the paper system had probably never have been introduced, and that society might have been much happier without it. The practical statesman has a very different task to perform. He has to look at things as they are; to take them as he finds them; to supply deficiencies, and to prune excesses, as far as in him lies. The task of furnishing a corrective for derangements of the paper medium, with us, is almost inexpressibly great.13

Old-fashioned in so many of his political views, Tyler in this one instance was ahead of his time.14 Unfortunately, the veto of the Fiscal Bank Act had created a permanent rift between the president and the Whigs, and Tyler’s alternative proposal never stood a chance. Tyler’s entire cabinet (with the exception of Daniel Webster) resigned after the veto, and “His Accidency” was vilified in public rallies and in the Whig press. As demonstrated by this brief sketch, there are some basic correspondences between “The Gold-Bug,” in which the central character converts a coded pirate map into pirate’s treasure, and the general political context of Poe’s day, in which partisan factions fought to establish the proper relation between a system of (paper) signs and the gold accumulated in various public and private treasuries. These basic correspondences take on special significance in light of Poe’s personal quest to create some kind of profitable connection between politics and cryptography. As mentioned in Chapter Two, between 1841 and 1843 Poe engaged in a desperate (and ill-fated) attempt to obtain a presidential patronage job. To improve his chances with President Tyler, Poe enlisted the aid of such intermediaries as Frederick W. Thomas (a federal employee) and Robert Tyler (a minor poet and son of the president). Poe started making inquiries soon after Tyler succeeded Harrison as president, but even prior to Harrison’s death, Poe had inklings that cryptography possessed certain political applications which might be exploited for monetary gain. The link between cryptography and political conflict first became apparent to Poe in Philadelphia during the summer of 1840. At this time, Poe befriended F. W. Thomas (in Philadelphia for the Whig convention) and journalist Jesse Erskine Dow (a radical Democrat or “Loco-Foco” who was in town to testify in a court case). The three men became companions and frequented a number of public houses, where they discussed “literature, politics, and cryptograms” (Poe Log, 295). According to the account of F. W. Thomas, which was later

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published in Graham’s Magazine, the three disagreed over the ciphers of Aaron Burr (which Poe dismissed as “shallow artifice”), and on at least one occasion Dow invented ciphers to test Poe’s ability (if not his sobriety). The political connotations of cryptography carried over into the series of “posers” and “puzzles” that Poe contributed to Alexander’s Weekly Messenger in 1840: one of the cryptograms submitted for deciphering contained a partisan account of the Battle of Tippecanoe.15 Poe’s interest in the link between cryptography and politics took a more serious turn in 1841, when he first entertained the idea of landing a patronage job in the Tyler administration. At approximately the same time, Poe composed his first article on “Secret Writing” for Graham’s Magazine. In what seems to be a bit of wishful thinking, Poe describes cryptography as a skill that is highly valued (and highly remunerated) by governments: It is not to be supposed that Cryptography, as a serious thing, as the means of imparting important information, has gone out of use at the present day. It is still commonly practiced in diplomacy; and there are individuals, even now, holding office in the eye of various foreign governments, whose real business is that of deciphering. We have already said that a peculiar mental action is called into play in the solution of cryptographical problems, at least in those of the higher order. Good cryptographists are rare indeed; and thus their services, although seldom required, are necessarily well requited. (Complete Works, 14:123)

Though he refers to foreign countries, Poe was of course trying to obtain an office “in the eye” of the U.S. government. Significantly, after the first article on “Secret Writing” had appeared, Poe started soliciting and solving cryptograms from people who already held government offices. As noted above, Poe’s sponsor in this effort was his friend F. W. Thomas, who had recently obtained a temporary clerkship in the Treasury Department and who would later serve as press agent for the president’s second wife, Julia Gardiner Tyler. There is, not incidentally, a curious connection between the ancestral home of Julia Gardiner Tyler and the legendary pirate Captain Kidd. According to Gardiner family history, in 1699 Captain William Kidd dropped anchor off of Gardiner’s Island (near the eastern tip of Long Island). While their captain imposed upon the hospitality of the Gardiner family, Kidd’s men secretly smuggled ashore some of their treasure for safe keeping. The treasure was later recovered, but myths about buried treasure persisted long afterwards, and Poe may have known this when he composed “The Gold-Bug.”16 In any event, F. W. Thomas’s glowing descriptions of government work provided the original inspiration behind Poe’s quest for a political sinecure. Once the quest was underway, Thomas used his government contacts to provide Poe with both cryptograms (for magazine articles) and employment information (for the patronage quest). On 1 July 1841, for example, Thomas submitted a complex cipher from Dr. Charles S. Frailey, clerk in the General Land


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Office. In a subsequent letter, Thomas sent Poe a numerical cryptogram from McClintock Young, the chief clerk of the Treasury; in this same letter, Thomas provided inside information regarding President Tyler’s distress over “conflicting parties” and “the expected cabinet break up.”17 Poe put most of these materials to good use. The cipher from Charles Frailey became the basis for a Graham’s cryptography contest (August 1841); two months later, Poe gave his own solution to the cipher as the basis for yet another article on “Secret Writing.” The solution to the Frailey cipher constitutes Poe’s greatest cryptographic achievement, and he must have hoped that such an achievement would somehow catch the eye of President Tyler.18 Poe’s last article on “Secret Writing” will be discussed at greater length below, but here it should be noted that for Poe, cryptography was never entirely separate from political intrigue and political advancement. It is therefore quite plausible that he contrived to advance his cause by decoding his own cipher, either in the press, or in a public lecture, or in a personal audience with one of the Tylers.19 Cryptography was not the only device that Poe used in his campaign for a patronage job. In his first (26 June 1841) inquiry to F. W. Thomas, Poe experiments with a straightforward (and rather awkward) approach: Do you seriously think that an application on my part to Tyler would have a good result? My claims, to be sure, are few. I am a Virginian—at least I call myself one. . . My political principles have always been as nearly as may be, with the existing administration, and I battled with right good will for Harrison, when the opportunity offered. (Letters, 1:170)

In a postscript to this letter, Poe adds: “It is not impossible that you could effect my object by merely showing this letter yourself personally to the President and speaking of me as the original editor of the Messenger” (170). Poe was probably attempting to exploit Tyler’s famous support for all things Virginian, but the reference to the Messenger constitutes a subtler appeal. Poe may well have known, for example, that Tyler was himself a Messenger subscriber.20 In addition, Poe may have believed that his proposed magazine—first called Penn Magazine and later The Stylus—could serve as a political organ for the besieged president. In his 3 February 1842 letter to F. W. Thomas, Poe in fact suggests that such a plan should be broached to Robert Tyler: You are personally acquainted with Robert Tyler, author of “Ahasuerus.” In this poem there are may evidences of power, and, what is better, of nobility of thought & feeling. In reading it, an idea struck me—“Might it not,” I thought, “be possible that he would, or rather might be induced to feel some interest in my contemplated scheme, perhaps even to take an interest in something of the kind—an interest either open or secret?” The Magazine might be made to play even an important part in the politics of the day, like Blackwood; and in this view might be worthy of his consideration. Could you contrive to suggest the matter to him? (Letters, 1:192)

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Poe’s design is revealed in the punning transition from one kind of interest (sympathetic concern) to another (financial backing); as we shall see, Poe engages in a similar form of profit-oriented punning in “The Gold-Bug.” Beyond what it demonstrates about a specific patronage quest, this letter should give pause to anyone attempting to decipher Poe’s true political beliefs, for despite his professed commitment to “an absolutely independent criticism” (ER, 1035), he seems only too eager to bend his magazine to the ideological agenda of a new kind of “capital” reader—namely the president of the United States. To lobby more effectively for his “contemplated schemes,” Poe traveled to Washington in March 1843. He may have been seeking a personal audience with President Tyler, but Poe seems to have botched his chances through erratic behavior and excessive drinking. One acquaintance ( Jesse Erskine Dow) warned that Poe “exposes himself here to those who may injure him very much with the President . . . . He does not understand the ways of politicians, nor the manner of dealing with them to advantage. How should he?” (Poe Log, 405). Without dismissing Dow’s concerns, it should be noted that Poe’s chances would have been slim in any event, partly due to the extreme surplus of job-seekers, and partly due to the political controversies that undermined Tyler’s control over appointments. Poe may have been willing to sell his head in Washington, but no one wanted to buy it. The Tyler presidency nevertheless retains a special significance for any investigation of Poe and his era. Up to this point we have considered such material issues as patronage and monetary policy, but Poe surely would have paid close attention to John Tyler’s dramatic political style and to the way that he used confrontation and vilification to shape his public image. Tyler could endure—and even welcome—political confrontations because he used them as opportunities to display his resistance to tyranny. As we have seen, Poe himself used similar tactics when he fought against the literary cliques of the Northeast, and he may have hoped that the president would see these editorial battles as worthy fulfillments of the Virginia state motto (sic semper tyrannis). In any event, Tyler’s displays of resistance were not simply theatrical performances, for he seems to have been motivated by deeply felt moral and ideological convictions. During moments of righteous indignation, Tyler invoked historical images of republican rebellion against despotism, and he often portrayed himself as a kind of noble martyr in the cause of (states’) freedom from (federal) tyranny. Not surprisingly, many of these images were derived from the period of the American Revolution. When Tyler vetoed a second bill for a national bank, for example, he claimed that “I have been actuated by no other motive or desire than to uphold the institutions of the country, as they have come down to us from the hands of our godlike ancestors; and . . . I shall esteem my efforts to sustain them, even though I perish, more honourable than to win the applause of men by a sacrifice of my duty and my conscience.”21


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On many other occasions, Tyler traced his political ancestry to ancient Rome, especially to the celebrated opponents of Caesar’s tyranny. In 1833, for example, Tyler posed as a stoical Cassius: If I stand alone in opposition to [a consolidated national government], I am ready to abide my fate, and if that fate be perpetual banishment, I care little on my own account. I would sooner desire the character of him who was called ‘Ultimus Romanorum’ than the oily and supple Antony.22

When he spoke against efforts to compel South Carolina’s continued presence in the Union, Tyler quoted Shakespeare’s Brutus, and when he resigned from the Senate in 1836, his supporters—quoting Pope’s Essay on Man—likened Tyler to Marcellus: “More true joy Marcellus exiled feels, / Than Caesar with a Senate at his heels.”23 It is of course more difficult for an acting president to pose as a martyr to the cause of freedom. Even Andrew Jackson, that apostle of the common man, had frequently been portrayed as a “King” or “Caesar” figure. However, when Tyler acceded to the presidency in 1841, a curious transformation took place. Since Tyler was besieged on all sides, and since he had little success in realizing his own legislative agenda, he was not perceived as a domineering tyrant. This role was instead ascribed to Henry Clay, especially by Clay’s opponents.24 And although Brutus and Cassius were still popular as models of resistance to tyranny, the figure of Cato enjoyed a renewed significance. Senator Henry Wise, defending Tyler’s veto of the bank, pointed out that the Whig Party had always been composed of two different groups. One group, symbolized by Henry Clay, consisted of “National Whigs” who favored a stronger federal government. The “Republican Whigs,” on the other hand, favored states’ rights and were symbolized by Tennessee Judge Hugh Lawson White, also known as the “Cato of the republic” or the “American Cato.”25 The name “Cato,” it should be noted, referred to several different historical personages and literary personae, and for this reason it played a complex and somewhat confused role in the discourse of American politics. There was, first of all, Marcus Porcius Cato (known as Cato the Censor or Cato the Elder, 234–149 B.C.), who was renowned for advocating a return to the morality and austere simplicity of the early days of the ancient Roman republic. Then there was his great grandson Marcus Porcius Cato (surnamed Uticensis, known as Cato the Younger, 95–46 B.C), who modeled himself on his ancestor and who was renowned for his stoicism in the face of adversity, his dedication to republican liberty, and his resistance to Caesar’s tyranny. Apropos to the political struggles of the Tyler administration, Cato the Younger placed tight controls on the Roman treasury, and when surrounded by Caesar’s troops at Utica, Cato chose to impale himself on his own sword rather than surrender to tyranny. This last act of defiance is famously depicted in Joseph Addison’s Cato, a play that helped convey the Cato legend to British North America.

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As noted by various historians, the play was admired by the likes of Patrick Henry and George Washington; Washington is in fact reputed to have ordered a performance of Addison’s Cato for his weary troops at Valley Forge. In the American colonies, according to Bernard Bailyn, various renditions of the Roman statesman coalesced into a “Catonic image,” which fueled an “extreme solicitude for the individual and an equal hostility to government.”26 This tradition survived into the early 1840s, and at least one writer saw the renewed bank war as a conflict between Clay and Cato.27 The full importance of this will be explored in the next section, but for now I would simply emphasize how much John Tyler drew from classical literature and history to wage a political struggle over the destiny—especially the economic destiny— of the nation. When Poe sought a patronage job under the Tyler administration, he therefore found himself in a perplexing world of unreliable paper banknotes, coded literary allusions, and bitter political infighting. The nature of this world is conveniently captured in Poe’s correspondence with John Tomlin. Tomlin, a minor author who helped drum up subscribers for Penn Magazine, wrote to Poe in 1840 to inquire if “Tennessee money is current in the ordinary business transactions of your city.”28 A few months after writing to Poe, Tomlin was appointed postmaster of Jackson, Tennessee, by lame-duck President Van Buren. Tomlin later told Poe of his anxiety about keeping this job under a new presidential administration: “If John Tyler . . . removes me from office for being a loco-foco, I will certainly be opposed to him.”29 During this time, of course, Poe was hoping that the removal of Democratic appointees like Tomlin might open up a patronage position for himself, thereby liberating him from his financial dependence on literature: “I would be glad to get almost any appointment—even a $500 one—so that I have something independent of letters for subsistence. To coin one’s brain into silver, at the nod of a master, is to my thinking, the hardest task in the world.”30 At this time, owners of gold or silver could present their metal to the United States Mint for coining, so the metaphor is particularly appropriate. Poe was struggling to escape the circuit of capitalist production—from brain to paper to money—that entangled even the most lofty of America’s literati. In order to understand Poe’s experiments with cryptography, it is therefore necessary to consider not only the general predicament of signification in an emerging capitalist society but also the specific relations of production that inspired both the diffusion of knowledge and the enclosure (or monopoly control) of information. This contradiction between common knowledge and inside information can be detected in Poe’s shifting attitude toward cryptography. Though he had first stumbled upon secret writing as a gimmick to sell newspapers, Poe later described it as a device for mental improvement, an instrument of diplomacy, an aid to courtship, and finally as a means to locate the buried treasure of dead Scottish pirates. To be more precise, before com-


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posing “The Gold-Bug,” Poe had used cryptography both as a means to attract the attention of the literate masses and as an illustration of what separates the masses from the true person of genius. On one hand, then, Poe portrayed cryptography as something of a democratic art. In a series of articles for Alexander’s Weekly Messenger and Graham’s Magazine, he challenged his readers by claiming that “human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve” (Complete Works, 14:116). His later writings likewise imply that cryptography is a practical skill which can be attained through mere diligence. In his first Graham’s article on “Secret Writing,” he begins by suggesting that code-breaking should be taught in the academies “as the means of giving tone to the most important powers of mind,” and he concludes by assuring his readers that reference works are unnecessary because the aspiring cryptographer “will find nothing upon record which he does not in his own intellect possess” (Complete Works, 14:116, 132). On the other hand, Poe clearly believed that only a few gifted intellectuals were capable of breaking the more difficult codes. When Poe describes the diplomatic uses of secret writing, for example, he treats cryptographic ability as a rare and lucrative form of genius. This same attitude informs the portrayal of Legrand in “The Gold-Bug,” as well as Poe’s smug confidence that he alone could solve the “ingenious” Frailey cipher (Complete Works, 14:134). Not surprisingly, then, when a Graham’s reader named Richard Bolton did manage to crack the code, Poe responded with amazement: . . . your solution astonished me. You will accuse me of vanity in so saying—but truth is truth. I make no question that it even astonished yourself—and well it might—for from among at least 100,000 readers—a great number of whom, to my certain knowledge busied themselves in the investigation—you and I are the only persons who have succeeded.31

Taken as a whole, Poe’s cryptographic writings register a complex and contradictory relation to the emerging mass audience. Sometimes he viewed secret writing as a mere ploy to maximize the sales of a mass-market periodical, a ploy which “in the eyes of the mob at least, is not much above that of a bottle-conjuror” (Letters, 1:190). At other times he saw cryptography as a device to insulate himself and his writing from the same literate masses he was hired to exploit. These conflicting views indicate a material link between coded secrets and what Poe elsewhere identified as the “secrets of the magazine prison-house.” Instead of liberating him from this prison-house, however, cryptography merely revealed the true nature of his incarceration, and later on in his life Poe complained ruefully about the intellectual labor that he had squandered in solving ciphers: You will hardly believe me when I tell you that I have lost, in time, which to me is money, more than a thousand dollars, in solving ciphers, with no other object in

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view than that just mentioned. A really difficult cipher requires vast labor and the most patient thought in its solution.32

In other words, the very skill that was to make money, either through increasing magazine circulation or landing a government appointment, ended up costing Poe more than a thousand dollars’ worth of time. Caught up in the growing complicity between capitalism and signification, he ultimately discovered that secret writing offered no reprieve from the hard labor of literary production.

II. CODES Between July and December 1841, Poe published a series of four articles on “Secret Writing” in Graham’s Magazine. In the introduction to the series, Poe innocently remarks that “we can scarcely imagine a time when there did not exist a necessity, or at least a desire, of transmitting information from one individual to another in such a manner as to elude general comprehension.”33 He neglects to offer an explanation, but five months later, in his last Graham’s article on cryptography, he again calls attention to the interplay—or perhaps the conspiracy—of necessity and desire that inspired his turn to secret writing. In the body of the article, Poe reprints a letter from one “W. B. Tyler,” which contains two cryptograms; the letter claims that these cryptograms are “perfect” because they cannot be unlocked without the “proper key” (Complete Works, 14:143). Apparently unwilling to transmit all the information in his possession, Poe raises more doubts in his last article on secret writing than he dispels, and the letter at the heart of the article contains at least three unresolved mysteries. First, no one fitting the description of “W. B. Tyler” has ever been found, and as Shawn Rosenheim and Louis Renza have recently argued, there is good reason to suspect that the alleged composer of the allegedly perfect cryptograms is none other than Poe himself.34 The second mystery concerns the messages encrypted in the Tyler letter. In what follows, I will show that one of the ostensibly perfect codes can in fact be broken. If Rosenheim and Renza are correct, the resulting message constitutes a text that Poe never intended to reveal. There is, finally, a third mystery more important than the encoded message, and this involves the conspiracy of necessity and desire that motivated the use of cryptography in the first place. Despite the intrigue surrounding Poe’s use of pseudonyms and secret codes, what really matters are the conditions that impelled him to circulate among the literate masses a kind of writing designed “to elude general comprehension.” In other words, the real secret of a cryptogram is not the concealed message but the social function of secrecy itself.


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Like Poe’s previous writings on cryptography, the Tyler letter acknowledges the “high practical importance” of cryptography to generals, scholars, travelers and lovers, but it begins by emphasizing the “peculiar virtues” of a coded diary: I have thus a record of thoughts, feelings and occurrences,—a history of my mental existence, to which I may turn, and in imagination, retrace former pleasures, and again live through by-gone scenes,—secure in the conviction that the magic scroll has a tale for my eye alone. Who has not longed for such a confidante? (Complete Works, 14:140–41)

If Poe and Tyler are one in the same, the letter would contain two “magic scrolls” of Poe’s dialogue with either himself or with some mysterious confidant. The letter also challenges the characterization of cryptography as a popular art. Revising Poe’s earlier claim that “human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher that human ingenuity cannot resolve” (Complete Works, 14:116), “Tyler” argues that there are in fact several different ways to construct a perfect cryptograph.35 The first involves applying “the simple cipher to words written backwards and continuously.” Tyler boasts that this method “might be called a perfect cryptograph, since from the want of spaces, and consequently the impossibility of comparing words, it would utterly perplex the person attempting to discover its hidden import, and yet with the help of the key, each letter being known, the words could easily be separated and inverted” (143– 44). At the end of the letter, however, Tyler conspicuously disavows any intent to challenge Poe’s cryptographic skill. In the editorial remarks that follow, Poe—writing explicitly in his own voice—doubts that the cipher is truly perfect, but he excuses himself from attempting a solution. According to Rosenheim, Poe’s refusal demonstrates “the success of a mode of ‘secret intercommunication’ whose meaning was safe from public readers” (Cryptographic Imagination, 394). But what happens to this theory, or to any theory predicated upon deferred or absent meaning, if a mode of secret writing fails to conceal its message from public readers? In order to answer this question, I have decoded the cryptogram. The cipher printed below approximates Tyler’s version with a slightly different set of symbols.36 It varies somewhat from the original text printed in Graham’s Magazine (December 1841), but in cryptography the appearance of symbols matters less than their sequence and diversity. This method, moreover, allows for the correction of errors in other texts, including those in the standard edition of Poe’s works.37 The corrected cryptograph appears in Figure 7.1. The first word I deciphered was {, ✝ §}, which represents “eht” or “the” spelled backwards. Because “the” appears seven times, deciphering this one word made it relatively easy to crack the entire code. In so doing I found that

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,✝§:‡][,?‡),[¡¶?,✝,)¡,§[¶6,:¶![ §(,✝⬙¡“(?✙?,✳✳(✙✙¡([,¶★.✙[§¡¶§¡ ¶]¿,✝§[?(§[::(✝[.✙(★;(⬙(,✝§¡‡[★ :,]!¶✝⬙]?✳!¶✙✝!¶⬙,✳(✝¡(,?‡§(¡ ✍¡¶[¡¶[?(,;§‡☞‡]✝§§:(✝[✝[¶?‡]: ★ ¡¶:(§?]!¶✝§‡];§?‡✝¡‡✙¶!(,✝§?(⬙ ★ ][§¡❛¡,:,,✝§✍),?⬙★]?,§§(!✙¡(, ✝§✝[‡!)★][✙:?]⬙ Figure 7.1. Adaptation of “W. B. Tyler” Cryptogram from Graham’s Magazine (Dec. 1841).

the letter “e” was represented by three different symbols {, . ’}. Further analysis of the text yielded a complete set of correspondences: ( ☞ ) ✙ A B C D

,.⬘ E

★ ✳ ✝ ¶ ✍ : ! ¡ ] ¿ ? [ § ‡ “ 6 ; F G H I K L M N O P R S T U W X Y

These substitutions produce the following text: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

EHTLUOSERUCESNIREHECNETSIXELIMS TAEHTNWARDREGGADDNASEIFEDSTNITN IOPEHTSRATSLLAHSEDAFYAWAEHTNUSF LEOMIHWORGMIDHTIWEGAHNAERUTAN KNISNISRAEYTUBUOHTTLAHSHSIRUOL FNILATROMIHTUOYTRUHNUDIMAEHTRAW FOSTNENELEEHTKCERWFORETTAMDNAE HTHSUMCFOSDLROW

This still left several errors. In line one, “smil” (lims) should be “smiles.” Line two has “ints” (stni) instead of “its.” In line four, “himoelf” (fleomih) should be “himself” and “anh” should be “and.” “Immortal” and “elements” are misspelled in lines six and seven, and in the last line, “cmush” (hsumc) should obviously be “crush.” To produce the final decoded message, I corrected these errors, reversed the words (which had been spelled backwards) and added appropriate spacing and punctuation: The soul secure in her existence smiles at the drawn dagger and defies its point. The stars shall fade away, the sun himself grow dim with age and nature sink in years, but thou shalt flourish in immortal youth, unhurt amid the war of elements, the wreck of matter and the crush of worlds.

When I first broke the code, I thought that I had uncovered an original message by Poe. For one thing, the idea of a soul menaced by material decay pervades much of Poe’s speculative writing, including “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” and Eureka. The reference to a feminine soul suggested a more precise possibility, namely that


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the cryptogram concealed a secret note from Poe to his wife Virginia or to some other lover. The Tyler letter, after all, refers to cryptography as a device for concealing love letters, and the stated motives for secrecy come straight out of Poe’s life: What can be so delightful amid the trials of absent lovers, as a secret intercourse between them of their hopes and fears,—safe from the prying eyes of some old aunt, or it may be, of a perverse and cruel guardian?—a billet doux that will not betray its mission, even if intercepted, and that can “tell no tales” if lost, or, (which sometimes occurs) if stolen from its violated depository. (Complete Works, 14:141)

The old aunt and the cruel guardian, of course, could represent Maria Clemm and John Allan. The idea of stolen letters looks forward to “The Purloined Letter,” but it also recalls the love letters that Poe wrote to Elmira Royster, letters which were intercepted and confiscated by her father.38 The style of the message, moreover, resembles the encouraging and bombastic tone of Poe’s only extant letter to Virginia: “Keep up your heart in all hopefulness, and trust yet a little longer—In my last great disappointment, I should have lost my courage but for you” (Letters, 2:318). In his editorial commentary on this letter, John Ward Ostrom reports that Poe wrote numerous “notes” to Virginia, none of which survived. What Ostrom does not report is that Virginia often wrote back. On one occasion she even sent him a valentine containing her own experiment with secret writing, an acrostic poem that spells out Poe’s full name with the initial letters of each line.39 Based upon all this, I initially conjectured that the Tyler letter did indeed contain a love letter from Edgar to Virginia, one affording a rare glimpse into the method and substance of their private correspondence. As John Hodgson has shown, however, the message is not an original composition by Poe, but rather a quotation from the final act of Joseph Addison’s tragedy Cato.40 At the commencement of the fifth act, Cato stoically awaits the defeat of republican rule by Caesar’s superior forces. Taking comfort from a book of Plato’s philosophy, Cato soliloquizes about the immortal soul amidst “the wreck of matter,” and then he resolves that he will never be taken alive, “a slave, a captive, into Caesar’s hands” (V.ii.9). It is therefore clear that “W. B. Tyler” encrypted part of the climactic soliloquy from Addison’s Cato, but it is not clear what this signifies. In a general sense, the solution of the cryptogram indicates the perishable quality of mystery and the fleeting power of concealed information. Poe undoubtedly understood such limitations; having no valuable secrets to exploit, he could only exploit the technique (and popular mystique) of secrecy, as he does in tales ranging from “MS. Found in a Bottle” to “The Purloined Letter.” But the full significance of the Cato cryptogram hinges upon the true identity of its composer. If W. B. Tyler is not Poe, the cryptogram demonstrates little more than the fact that Addison’s Cato was still a quotable text. If, on the other hand, W. B. Tyler is Poe’s alter ego, the

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cryptogram has more serious implications. It would indicate, among other things, that Poe used the pseudonym Tyler to encode a message uniquely suited to please and comfort President Tyler. And if this is the case, it would indicate something more profound about Poe’s ostensible ideology and the limits to his literary independence. It is possible, in other words, that Poe started with one of the key literary sources for American republicanism, a text analogous to Patrick Henry’s “give me liberty or give me death,” and then converted it into a kind of gimmick or ideological coin to purchase the favor of the Tyler administration. This would obviously make a mockery of Cato’s legendary rectitude, just as it would subvert W. B. Tyler’s desire to possess a “magic scroll” meaningful to himself alone. And Poe himself, far from achieving an “absolutely independent criticism,” would instead appear to have acted as the political equivalent of his raven, croaking out codes that were meaningful only to others. The question of the true identity of W. B. Tyler is therefore worth addressing, despite the absence of definitive evidence. John Hodgson concludes, rather hastily I think, that the mere quoting of Addison’s Cato demonstrates that “W. B. Tyler is not Poe” (534). To support this claim, Hodgson points to the 1847 tale “The Domain of Arnheim,” in which Poe makes some disparaging remarks about the “hobbling criticism” that would offer prescriptive rules for artistic creation. According to Poe, it is wrong to “elevate Addison into apotheosis” because although “we may be instructed how to build a ‘Cato’ . . . we are in vain told how to conceive a Parthenon or an ‘Inferno’ ” (532). This remark from “The Domain of Arnheim” constitutes the sole evidence for Hodgson’s position. Though I admire Hodgson’s research and analysis, I must disagree with his ultimate conclusion. The Cato revelation may cast doubt on my initial speculations about an encrypted billet doux, but it does not demonstrate that Rosenheim, Renza, and others were wrong in ascribing the W. B. Tyler letter to Poe. In many ways, the discovery of the source actually lends plausibility to the case for Poe’s authorship because it links the Tyler letter more directly to Poe’s quest for a patronage job in the Tyler administration. There are several reasons for this, which I shall attempt to recount in concise fashion. First, it is necessary to consider the timing of Poe’s comments on Cato in relation to the Tyler administration (1841–45). “The Domain of Arnheim” is a revised, 1847 version of a tale originally published in October 1842 as “The Landscape Garden.” In both texts, Poe rejects prescriptive (Addisonian) criticism, but in the 1842 tale Poe conspicuously omits Cato and instead refers to the Odyssey: “We may be instructed how to build an Odyssey, but it is in vain that we are told how to conceive a ‘Tempest,’ an ‘Inferno,’ a ‘Prometheus Bound’ . . .”41 If one were disparaging Addisonian prescriptions, it would certainly make sense to disparage a literary work by Addison. If, on the other hand, Poe had just pub-


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lished a Cato cryptogram which he wanted to conceal—for whatever private purpose—it would make sense to avoid disparaging Cato in a tale published less than one year later. And if the Cato cryptogram did indeed have something to do with the presidential administration of John Tyler, the motives for silence would have been substantially diminished by 1847, when Tyler was no longer in office. Second, insofar as this refutes the case against Poe’s authorship, all of the internal evidence from the W. B. Tyler letter must be given full consideration. Some of this evidence has already been discussed (including the intimations about stolen love letters, violated depositories, and cruel guardians). In addition, the letter addresses “Poe” with a deference that borders on worship, and yet there is a sly undercurrent of Poe-esque impudence.42 When Tyler gets to specifics, moreover, his arguments and opinions conform to Poe’s in almost every respect. Like Poe, W. B. Tyler seeks to correct the popular misconception of cryptography as an “impenetrable mystery” (119; 143); like Poe, W. B. Tyler objects to amateur cryptographers who use the same symbol to represent several letters (130; 142); like Poe, W. B. Tyler praises cryptography as a device for strengthening “mental discipline” (116; 141); like Poe, Tyler emphasizes the (military and diplomatic) value of cryptography to the state; and like Poe, Tyler explains certain features of cryptography by employing the metaphor of a lock and key (131; 142). Finally, it is necessary to consider “W. B. Tyler’s” intimate familiarity with Poe’s articles on cryptography. At one point Tyler quotes Poe directly, and on numerous other occasions Tyler borrows key words and phrases from Poe’s first Graham’s article on secret writing.43 These could be dismissed as the mannerisms of a highly imitative reader, but in one instance W. B. Tyler paraphrases an unsigned article by Poe that had appeared nearly two years earlier in Alexander’s Weekly Messenger.44 In isolation, none of this evidence is conclusive, but taken together it provides a strong prima facia case for Poe’s authorship. That is to say, unless and until contravening evidence appears, we may tentatively presume that Poe and W. B. Tyler are one in the same. I believe we may also presume that the Cato cryptogram was designed to advance Poe’s patronage quest, primarily because Cato’s soliloquy would have struck a responsive chord in the president. As noted above, Addison’s Cato was a key document for American republicanism, especially insofar as it emphasized the personal responsibility for resisting tyranny. Given John Tyler’s fondness for identifying with Caesar’s opponents, he would have taken special comfort from Addison’s play because he was, like the historical Cato, besieged on all sides by (tyrannical) political opponents. And even if Tyler had not been embroiled in a bitter struggle with the Henry Clay faction of the Whigs, he still would have been pleased by a quotation from an author he so admired. One of Tyler’s biographers has described him as “a disciple of Addison,” and in his

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correspondence Tyler frequently recommended Addison to his daughter Mary and his son Robert.45 Robert Tyler, it should be recalled, was the person Poe thought “might be induced to feel some interest in my contemplated scheme” (Letters, 1:192). For all of these reasons, I think it is plausible that Poe composed his last article on secret writing in an attempt to procure a political appointment from the presidential administration of John Tyler. And presumably, a cryptogram designed to win a patronage job would not be doing double duty as a billet doux, despite all of “W. B. Tyler’s” intimations about spiritual immortality and a “secret intercourse” between “absent lovers.” Curiously, at least one other Poe text about absent lovers and the undying soul was pressed into service for the patronage campaign. “Eleonora” was first published in the Gift on 1 September 1841, and then reprinted in a variety of newspapers and magazines.46 These reprintings have been carefully documented by Mabbott, Pollin, and others, but it has not yet been recorded that “Eleonora” also appeared in the Madisonian for 25 September 1841. As we have seen, the Madisonian was the official press organ of John Tyler at a time when most newspapers—Whig and Democrat alike—were hostile to the administration. It is not known whether Poe himself or one of his Washington friends caused the tale to be inserted in the Madisonian, but its insertion made it as easy for John Tyler to read Poe as it was for Poe to read John Tyler. Inducing the president to read Poe was certainly part of the plan, but there are no signs that Tyler got around to it until spring of 1860, when he quoted a stanza from Poe’s “To One in Paradise” at the close of a banquet speech delivered in Richmond.47 In a final irony of the patronage campaign, the Richmond banquet was dedicated to the memory of Henry Clay. Regardless of whether the Cato cryptogram aimed at love or money, events have conspired to keep it secret. Some of these are simple accidents, such as the typesetting error in the standard edition by Harrison. Clearly, however, Poe wanted the cryptogram to remain in a kind of neutral territory between public and private discourse. In the Graham’s article containing the Tyler letter, he takes three unusual steps to protect his message: he attributes the letter to a fictitious “W. B. Tyler”; he constructs what he believes to be a “perfect” cryptogram; and then, posing as Tyler, he asks the “editor”—and implicitly the reading audience—not to bother trying to solve it: “I wish to be distinctly understood; the secret communication above, and the one following, are not intended to show that you have promised more than you can perform. I do not take up the gauntlet” (144). Above and beyond these measures, Poe took one further step to guard the secrecy of the cryptogram. Shortly after the December issue of Graham’s had been printed, Poe wrote to Richard Bolton, the reader who had demonstrated “astonishing” skill at code breaking. In his letter, Poe tries to dissuade Bolton from attempting to solve the Tyler cryptograms:


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It is unnecessary to trouble yourself with the cipher printed in our Dec. number—it is insoluble for the reason that it is merely type in pi or something near it. Being absent from the office for a short time, I did not see a proof and the compositors have made a complete medley. It has not even a remote resemblance to the MS. (Letters, 1:188–89)

This is misleading. “Type in pi” is printer slang for type that has been spilled or mixed. As demonstrated above, there are only seven minor errors in the first cryptograph, and it can most assuredly be solved. But Bolton didn’t know this. Believing Poe’s letter, he waited for Graham’s to publish the genuine cryptograms: A press of business at the close of the year has delayed my reply to your very complimentary letter of Nov. 18. I expected too, that your succeeding number [of Graham’s Magazine] would contain a correct print of the two cryptographs of Mr. Tyler, and I intended attempting their solution which I thought possible.48

Little suspecting that the “correct print” had already appeared, Bolton waited in vain. Justifiably fearful of such public readers, Poe used a lie to conceal what the code itself could not, and as far as we know the lie worked. In a scheme resembling that of “The Purloined Letter,” he passed a secret letter in the most public forum he could find, and it took 150 years for someone to notice. Ultimately, however, the decoded text undermines the critical celebration of self-reference and différance, for once we decipher the message, it looks less like a daring appropriation of “public” language for secret intercommunication than a desperate attempt to steal a moment’s respite from the industry of letters. And if the Tyler cryptogram did aim to relieve Poe from his economic distress, it further reveals how the capitalist publishing industry could penetrate even the more intimate or “private” realms of signification. In this light, Poe’s attempt to purloin his own literary commodity appears as the most petty of larcenies, for instead of attacking the magazine industry, he merely transforms another literary form—secret writing—into negotiable paper. The soul secure in her existence may yet be a captive in the magazine prison-house. This captivity limited Poe’s ability to sell secret writing to the mass audience, especially since this audience was alert to the referential value of a sign. In his first series on cryptography for Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, Poe disingenuously claimed that his code breaking had aroused “a positive row” among his readership, but he also worried about exposing himself to “the charge of gaggery, or more delicately speaking, of humbug.”49 On two occasions Poe explicitly denied that “we wrote our own puzzles and then solved them” (Brigham, Edgar Allan Poe’s Contributions, 37, 45). In other words, although he hoped that his writings on cryptography would sell, he displayed from the start an unmistakable anxiety over the response of a fickle and sometimes dangerous public.50 His anxiety would attain fictive expression in “X-ing

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a Paragrab,” a satirical tale published in 1849. In the story, a printer’s devil with an incomplete set of type must substitute an “x” for every “o” in a newspaper editorial. The ensuing cryptogram stirs up a mob: The uproar occasioned by this mystical and cabalistic article, is not to be conceived. The first definite idea entertained by the populace was, that some diabolical treason lay concealed in the hieroglyphics; and there was a general rush to [the editor’s] residence, for the purpose of riding him out on a rail. (PT, 922)

Once again Poe returns to the conflict between coded texts and common knowledge. The comic vision of “X-ing a Paragrab” dramatizes a social contradiction which was still largely latent in the antebellum publishing environment. On one side stood the psychic and economic forces behind the enclosure or privatization of meaning; on the other side stood the literate masses, vigilantly guarding against all forms of communication designed to elude general comprehension.

III. GOLD The conflict between coded texts and common knowledge lies at the heart of “The Gold-Bug,” which Poe composed just one year after fabricating the Tyler letter. The story concerns a coded pirate manuscript, buried treasure, and a once wealthy aristocrat named William Legrand, who has taken refuge on Sullivan’s Island “to avoid the mortification consequent upon his [pecuniary] disasters” (PT, 560). While walking along the beach with his servant Jupiter, Legrand had discovered an unusual gold-colored beetle; after being bitten by the gold-bug, Legrand wrapped up the insect in an old piece of parchment that happened to be lying nearby. The narrator of the tale—a friend of Legrand—describes the intriguing and sometimes deceptive chain of events leading from the fortuitous discovery of the parchment note to a climactic scene where the note is “redeemed” for treasure worth over 1.5 million dollars. To understand the link between this treasure hunt and the emerging conditions of literary production, it is necessary to begin with money, which remains the most obvious and yet the most mysterious medium of exchange. Economic mystery is not a common subject of literary interpretation, but “The Gold-Bug” has inspired some critics to speculate about the conjunction of literature and economics in the tale. In Money, Language and Thought, for example, Marc Shell offers a major reinterpretation of “The Gold-Bug” based upon the correspondence between the events of the story and the general economic context.51 “At a time,” writes Shell, “when alchemists were trying to transform tin into gold by means of alchemy and financiers were turning paper money into gold by means of the newly widespread institution of paper money, Edgar Allan Poe was a poor author who could only wish to exchange


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his literary papers for money” (8). This context, however, would be of little importance if money were merely a theme of the story. Shell therefore focuses on money as “a unique sort of redeemable symbol” and on how the theme of treasure is “internalized in the symbolic mode of the narration” (10). After discussing the heavy use of puns and the multiple meanings of gold, Shell concludes that Poe’s story connects economic practices like usury and linguistic processes like punning, both of which “make something out of nothing” (19). This argument has some validity, but in failing to distinguish between money and capital, Shell obscures the productive process which only appears to turn nothing into something. Though “The Gold-Bug” contains an abundance of double entendres, the cryptogram that leads Legrand to the treasure must necessarily resist the inflation of meaning. The value of Captain Kidd’s letter can be realized only if Legrand establishes an unambiguous correspondence between language and the terrain of coastal South Carolina. The way that Legrand establishes this correspondence is not truly homologous to the exchange of paper money for specie. The entire story is in fact predicated on the difficulty of such an exchange, and although Legrand does ultimately redeem Kidd’s note, he must first expend a great deal of physical and intellectual labor on his journey from secret writing to buried treasure. As Michael Williams points out, Legrand’s labor is “doubly difficult” insofar as he “has not only to cope with the unreliability of language but also to discover meaning in a text which human ingenuity has deliberately rendered obscure.”52 More importantly, it is necessary to consider the harsh and compromising circumstances that would accompany Poe’s attempt “to exchange literary papers for gold.” According to Shell, the economic meaning of “The Gold-Bug” can be derived from the various puns on “bug” (insect and madman), “gose” (ghost and goose), “specie” (entomological specimen and gold coin), and “goole” (gold and ghoul), all of which indicate Poe’s “interest in a generation of something from nothing that is at once economic and linguistic” (21–22). But there is a triple pun in the story which indicates that the “something” was not quite derived from nothing, and this is the pun on “kid.” Two of the meanings are given in the story: a young goat (illustrated on the mysterious parchment) and Captain Kidd (the composer of the note). A third meaning is provided by the OED, which includes the following among the definitions of the verb “kid”: “To hoax, humbug, try to make (one) believe what is not true.” The entry for “kid” also cites a more pointed definition from the 1811 Lexicon Balatronicum: “to coax or wheedle. . . . To amuse a man or divert his attention while another robs him.”53 Like the twins of “William Wilson,” the code breaker William Legrand and the pirate William Kidd form something of a pair.54 The impoverished Legrand had once been a wealthy aristocrat; Captain Kidd had once served Britain with distinction—against the French and against pirates in the Indian

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Ocean—until he was himself accused of piracy. Both Legrand and Kidd take refuge for a time on Sullivan’s Island, and both know that cryptography leads to buried treasure. The end of the story further emphasizes their similarity. Accounting for the skeletons which were unearthed with the treasure chest, Legrand explains that Captain Kidd needed assistance to bury the gold, but that when “the worst of this labor” was finished, “he may have thought it expedient to remove all participants in his secret. Perhaps a couple of blows with a mattock were sufficient, while his coadjutors were busy in the pit; perhaps it required a dozen—who shall tell?” (595–96). These comments indicate Legrand’s chilling lack of moral sentiment, for he seems more interested in the technical details of the crime than in the horrible fact of murder itself. Daniel Hoffman correctly explains the macabre resemblance between the original burial of treasure supervised by Kidd and the subsequent disinterment directed by Legrand: Suppose, just suppose, for a moment, that Legrand, being like Kidd in his intellectual equipment, were also like Kidd in his moral equipment. He, too, has two coadjutors busy in the pit, the only human beings besides himself who know the location of Kidd’s treasure. He stands above the pit, a mattock in his hand. . . . By how thin a thread hang the lives of Doctor and old Jup.55

How thin a thread indeed. Legrand, after all, is “infected with misanthropy” (560), and though he spares the bodies of his coadjutors, he does strike at their minds. Explaining his eccentric behavior over the bug, Legrand tells the narrator, “I felt somewhat annoyed by your evident suspicions touching my sanity, and so resolved to punish you quietly, in my own way, by a little bit of sober mystification” (595). By so diverting the narrator’s attention, Legrand satisfies part of the definition of “kid”; it remains to be seen how Poe capitalizes on this diversion to commit his own form of literary robbery.56 As in “The Purloined Letter,” the literary crime in “The Gold-Bug” is facilitated by a series of exchanges and substitutions. There is something suspicious in the way the story relies on puns to substitute one meaning for another, and indeed Poe’s criminal intent can be detected in the precision with which he uses such crucial terms as “paper” and “specie.” As indicated above, some interpretations see the story as an allegory of Poe’s desire to “exchange . . . literary papers for money.” At least one of these readings makes repeated references to a paper document, using such phrases as “designed paper” or “Kidd’s valuable paper” or “a paper that renders forth golden specie.”57 But Poe actually exercises great care in distinguishing between mere paper and Kidd’s parchment. On several occasions Legrand goes out of his way to emphasize the difference. When he first decides to draw the bug, Legrand seats himself at a table with “a pen and ink, but no paper. He looked for some in a drawer, but found none.” When at the end of the story Legrand explains how he deciphered the scrap of parchment, the narrator interjects “The scrap of paper,


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you mean,” and Legrand replies, “No, it had much the appearance of paper, and at first I supposed it to be such, but when I came to draw upon it, I discovered it at once, to be a piece of very thin parchment” (581). Later Legrand explains why this is important: I had put together two links of a great chain. There was a boat lying on a sea-coast, and not far from the boat was a parchment—not a paper—with a skull depicted on it. . . . Parchment is durable—almost imperishable. Matters of little moment are rarely consigned to parchment; since, for the mere ordinary purposes of drawing or writing, it is not so nearly well adapted as paper. This reflection suggested some meaning—some relevancy—in the death’s-head. (583)

Parchment is made from the skin of a sheep or goat, but Poe also describes Kidd’s note as being vellum—a finer grade of parchment made out of lambskin or kidskin. Cognizant of the national debates over monetary policy, Poe deliberately avoids paper and instead uses a kidskin note by Captain Kidd to capitalize on the demand for pecuniary themes, laughing—or kidding—all the way to the bank. Poe employs the term “specie” with similar precision. Instead of conflating the various cognates of the term, as a simple punning strategy would dictate, Poe goes out of his way to avoid calling the gold-bug a new species: “He had found an unknown bivalve [i.e, a mollusk], forming a new genus, and, more than this, he had hunted down and secured, with Jupiter’s assistance, a scarabæus which he believed to be totally new, but in respect to which he wished to have my opinion on the morrow.”58 When the narrator inspects what he assumes is a drawing of the bug, he demonstrates a similar aversion to the term: “this is a strange scarabæus, I must confess: new to me: never saw anything like it before”; later on in the same scene, he remarks that “your scarabæus must be the queerest scarabæus in the world. . . I presume you will call the bug scarabæus caput hominis, or something of that kind” (563). Poe assisted in the preparation of several biology textbooks, so these circumlocutions are not accidental. Legrand has discovered a new genus of mollusk and a new species of scarabæus, but nowhere in the entire story is the bug referred to as a “species.” Poe reserves this designation for the code itself. Legrand first uses the term to describe the cryptograph: “From what is known of Kidd, I could not suppose him capable of constructing any of the more abstruse cryptographs. I made up my mind, at once, that this was of a simple species . . .” (587). As if indicating that this appearance of the term “species” is no accident, Legrand later remarks that “the specimen before us appertains to the very simplest species of cryptograph” (591). Kidd’s species of cryptograph, rather than a new insect species, is what makes Legrand rich. The treasure chest, which contains “no American money” (580), further indicates the central exchange of the story: not paper for paper, but code for gold.

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If cryptograms function as the coin of this ideal economic realm, there are several vital consequences for our understanding of Poe’s predicament as a commercial writer and his relation to the literate masses. One of the more obvious differences between paper money and the code is the amount of labor required to realize value. As indicated above, Poe well understood how much time and effort it took to practice cryptography: “The ratiocination actually passing through the mind in the solution of even a single cryptograph, if detailed step by step, would fill a large volume” (Complete Works, 14:149). Before composing “The Gold-Bug,” Poe had deliberately concealed the precise character of this ratiocinative work. Writing for Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, Poe on one occasion promises to reveal his “method of solution” (Brigham, Edgar Allan Poe’s Contributions, 39), but in the next issue he demurs: “Upon second thought, we must decline giving our mode of solution for the present” (45). The full exposition of his method comes only in “The Gold-Bug,” where Legrand explains cryptography in such detail that even the obtuse narrator begins to understand. The difference between Legrand and the narrator, of course, is no accident. Without Legrand’s brilliance, the code would remain unrecognized and unsolved. Its value can only be realized through the very specialized intellectual labor of cryptography, a form of labor which, despite all claims to the contrary, can be performed only by an elite few. “In speaking of our hundred thousand readers,” says Poe in his last article on secret writing, “we are reminded that of this vast number one, and only one, has succeeded in solving the cryptograph” (Complete Works, 14:149). The Tyler letter further emphasizes the personal and purely mental aspects of cryptography when it claims that the key, “by which alone [the code] can be unlocked, exists only in my mind” (Complete Works, 14:143). Poe here valorizes intellectual power in order to displace or overturn the dominance of physical capital. As noted above, he wishfully asserted that “good cryptographists . . . are necessarily well requited” (Complete Works, 14:123). In his 1845 article on “Anastatic Printing,” he likewise claimed that impoverished intellectuals would benefit from any technical advancement which reduced reliance on expensive printing machinery.59 And as noted in Chapter One, Poe even described the intellect itself as a species of self-expanding value or capital. Drawing an explicit connection between knowledge and gold, he insisted that “there are minds which not only retain all receipts, but keep them at compound interest for ever” (ER, 1318). This comparison between mind and gold points to a problematic beyond that of the sign or of paper money. In order to prevent his intellect from being treated like other forms of labor power, Poe attempted to turn it into a specialized, non-alienable form of capital. In other words, instead of exhausting himself by producing an endless succession of literary commodities, which would degrade writing into just another kind of exploitable labor, Poe struggled to transform his intellect—including the special capacity for solving cryptographs—into a productive force that could expand without limit. The same writer who com-


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plained of having to “coin one’s brain into silver” was perhaps not averse to coining his brain into gold. Cryptography, however, could not resolve the contradictions inherent in the new publishing environment. On the one hand, Poe resisted the degradation of literary labor by treating the mind—instead of paper, printing presses, or existing texts—as the one indispensable productive force in the new publishing environment. In his review of himself, Poe points out that “The materials of which ‘The Gold-Bug’ is constructed are, apparently, of the simplest kind. It is the mode of grouping them around the main idea and their absolute necessity of each to the whole in which the perfection of their use consists” (ER, 870). On the other hand, he elevated the importance of a material text which could not be memorized and which, in its encrypted form, could find no enduring place in everyday culture. For the talented intellectual, secret writing perhaps seemed an ideal way to subvert a publishing environment burdened by “a vast increase in thinking material” and a concomitant necessity “to put the greatest amount of thought in the smallest compass and disperse it with the utmost attainable rapidity” (ER, 1377). Like ancient scribes and priests, cryptographers would possess a kind of monopoly on the sign. But what value would cryptography hold for the mass audience? The question returns us to the central contradiction: Poe’s most popular tale is built around a device for “transmitting information from one individual to another in such a manner as to elude general comprehension” (Complete Works, 14:114). The use of this method in “The Gold-Bug” implies that the popular author must both sell to and mystify the mass audience. Even if decoding were possible, it is difficult to ascertain the precise use-value Poe would ascribe to a cryptographic commodity. Although the contents of an encrypted message might prove useful to governments and armies, Poe could never demonstrate its value to the masses. “The Gold-Bug” accordingly recasts the author as a mystifier or a withholder of information. In his letter to the narrator, Legrand writes, “I have something to tell you, yet scarcely know how to tell it, or whether I should tell it at all” (PT, 566); and the story concludes, appropriately, with Legrand asking “who shall tell?” (PT, 596). These and similar passages indicate a profound anxiety, not over money or language per se, but instead over value, specifically the value of a popular tale to the literate masses. His own review indicates that the tale aims more to mystify than to edify: The bug, which gives title to the story, is used only in the way of mystification, having throughout a seeming and no real connection with the subject. Its purpose is to seduce the reader into the idea of supernatural machinery, and to keep him so mystified until the last moment. (ER, 869)

In his articles on secret writing, cryptography is presented as a means of restricting information and of “giving tone to the most important powers of mind” (Complete Works, 14:116), but in “The Gold-Bug” cryptography serves

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merely as the counterpoint to the supernatural without providing any positive benefits in its own right. Its purpose is to seduce the reader into the idea of rational machinery, and to maintain this mystification until the last moment.60 It is while so diverting the reader’s attention that Poe perpetrates—figuratively if not literally—his crimes against common knowledge. Aside from robbing unsuspecting readers of their time and money, Poe deliberately seeks to deprive them of their collective myths. Keenly aware of his competitive relation to popular narratives, Poe first exploits and then displaces the widespread interest in pirate tales, buried treasure, and the supernatural. He employed a similar strategy in such hoaxes as “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” As indicated above, he also expected “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” to neutralize a general passion by acting as a “check to the gold-fever.” Importantly, these demystifications take the form of economic transactions, and in “The Gold-Bug” Poe accordingly uses cryptographic specie to drive out the popular tales that had attained “universal currency” (PT, 586). “The Gold-Bug” therefore reproduces the basic economic and political contradictions of an emerging mass culture. In his critical writings, Poe in fact treats the new literary market as the site of a political struggle over value. At times he embraces a conspicuously capitalist position, as when he claims that the value of a tale can be “estimated better by the circulation of the Magazine than by any comments upon its contents” (Letters, 1:58). At other times, however, he recoiled from this apparent philistinism and instead argues that popularity should be taken as “evidence of a book’s demerit, inasmuch as it shows . . . that the author has dealt largely, if not altogether, in matters which are susceptible of appreciation by the mass of mankind—by uneducated thought, by uncultivated taste, by unrefined and unguided passion” (ER, 312). In the “Philosophy of Composition” Poe tries to steer a middle course by proclaiming his desire to compose a poem that “should suit at once the popular and the critical taste” (ER, 15), but in practice he could never sustain an aesthetic resolution to the conflict over value, primarily because this conflict derived less from art per se than from the prevailing relations of production. Today the structural contradiction between textual commodities and common knowledge—between Edgar Allan Poe and the masses—remains an enduring obstacle to the development of a genuinely democratic culture. In adopting a strategy of manipulation, Poe symbolically robbed his readers of the interpretive power they needed to be full and active participants in the cultural life of the nation. Poe understood this. The theory of sympathy was central to antebellum culture and society, and in a review of Hawthorne, Poe made the sympathy between author and reader the basis for the most sublime literary pleasure: The true originality—true in respect of its purposes—is that which, in bringing out the half formed, the reluctant, or the unexpressed fancies of mankind, or in exciting


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the more delicate pulses of the heart’s passion . . . thus combines with the pleasurable effect of apparent novelty, a real egotistic delight. . . . [The reader] feels and intensely enjoys the seeming novelty of the thought, enjoys it as really novel, as absolutely original with the writer—and himself. They two, he fancies, have, alone of all men, thought thus. They two have, together, created this thing. Henceforward there is a bond of sympathy between them, a sympathy which irradiates every subsequent page of the book. (ER, 581)

In “The Gold-Bug” this sympathy is denied. Tales like “Murders in the Rue Morgue” affirm some measure of sympathy through the friendship between the aristocratic Dupin and the inquisitive American narrator. As indicated from the opening sentence, however, the obtuse narrator of “The Gold-Bug” had only “contracted an intimacy” with Legrand, and a contractual intimacy turns out to be no intimacy at all.61 In a story written expressly for the mass audience, Poe accordingly refused emotional identification between author and reader, an identification that he believed to be the basis for a genuine aesthetic experience. By relying on cryptography, Poe also refused an intellectual or rational bond between writer and audience, for he viewed secret writing as a means by which a select few could “elude general comprehension.” The new aesthetic summoned forth a mass of readers who were not active participants in culture but instead passive consumers of manipulative literary commodities. The aesthetic effect once produced by an interaction between reader and writer had been sequestered in the text itself, making it the sole repository of that “immense force derivable from totality” (ER, 572). In the inevitable fall from the highest order of poetry to the lowest order of the lettered mob, Poe protected himself from contamination by exchanging the art of sympathy for the science of the single effect. This protection came at a high price. The loss of sympathy that alienated the anonymous mass reader caused a corresponding estrangement in the writer. The emotional force of this estrangement can be seen in the Tyler letter, where Poe longs for a secret confidante and a “magic scroll [that] has a tale for my eye alone” (Complete Works, 14:141). The longing for a secret, sympathetic confidante only makes sense in a context which frustrates that desire, namely a mass market where authors hawk their literary commodities to anonymous and perhaps unworthy literary consumers. In “The Gold-Bug,” Poe responds to this predicament with a perverse and willful denial of sympathy. Into the heart of the commodity-text, he insinuates a means of communication designed to elude general comprehension, thereby flaunting, or reducing to absurdity, the new laws of literary production. In the Tyler cryptogram, however, this attempt to reclaim the commodity forces Poe into a more poignant and compromising predicament, for here he transforms secret writing—that most private of genres—into yet another form of negotiable paper. If he had maintained the privacy of the code, Poe might have pleaded, as he once did to John Allan, that he could “walk among infection & be uncontaminated”

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(Letters, 1:12). The plea has some validity, for a cryptographic message, like information capital and the Freudian unconscious, retains a certain power as long as it remains secret. But when the Tyler cryptogram is decoded, we uncover a text designed more to ingratiate than to inspire. Ultimately, then, even the soul of the author was contaminated by the new standard of value and the new conditions for cultural production. In such a publishing environment, Poe says elsewhere, “the mere man of letters must ever be a cipher” (ER, 1124).

Chapter Eight CULTURE OF SURFACES Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains. . . . I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic. (Charles Darwin)1

D

ESPITE ALL disagreements over art and ideology, most critics of detective fiction display a remarkable uniformity of purpose. Their mission, implicitly or explicitly proclaimed, is not so much to interpret a particular work, but rather to examine the flaws inherent in the form itself. Frequently this approach portrays the genre as a kind of literary vice that must be reformed or at least excused. Ernest Mandel begins Delightful Murder by “confessing” his craving for crime fiction, and then, as if to cure himself of an unseemly addiction, he rises to repudiate the form: “the common ideology of the original and classical detective story . . . remains quintessentially bourgeois. . . . The criminal is always caught. Justice is always done. Crime never pays. Bourgeois legality, bourgeois values, bourgeois society, always triumph in the end.”2 In another classic denunciation of detective fiction, Edmund Wilson just says no to “a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking.”3 Even a critic such as Fredric Jameson, who avoids the ranking of genres and who views the detective story as “a form without ideological content,” nevertheless laments the genre’s chronic banality. In a discussion of the commodification of contemporary fiction, Jameson invokes the detective story as something “you read ‘for the ending’—the bulk of the pages becoming sheer devalued means to an end—in this case, the ‘solution’—which is itself utterly insignificant insofar as we are not thereby in the real world and by the latter’s practical standards the identity of an imaginary murderer is supremely trivial.”4 In the detective story form therefore appears as a deficiency or limitation that must be acknowledged before all else. Other genres seem empowered by their stock of conventions and expectations, but for the detective story form is destiny: like a family curse, it arrests free development and condemns the victim to eke out an existence in the ghettos of mass culture. It is certainly possible to defend the genre—one might characterize a novel by Hammett or

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Chandler as a credit to the form; one might even point to Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson and Pynchon’s V. as works that overcame formal handicaps to achieve success as respectable literature. Despite all that might be said in apology, however, the form nevertheless seems guilty of something beyond the ideology or occasional incompetence of its practitioners. As Poe himself asked, “where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unravelling?” (Letters, 2:328). In the hands of a shrewd prosecutor, of course, such comments could be used to link the detective story to Poe’s other literary swindles, ranging from the scientific hoaxes to the falsified circulation figures to the broken promises of such uncompleted works as “MS. Found in a Bottle” and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. But instead of rushing to Poe’s defense, I propose to return to the scene of the crime in order to investigate the trajectory of the detective story in the hands of its inventor. The investigation commences with Poe’s minor crime stories, proceeds to general theories of literary evolution, and then moves on to consider the origin and history of the Dupin tales themselves. These three tales, written between 1841 and 1844, show Poe’s growing premonition of a world where all truth would be transferred from the metaphysical depths to the material surfaces of culture.5 By considering the Dupin tales as a genre in miniature, I hope to clarify the relation between emergent forms of culture and the general conditions of production in antebellum America. This relation is nowhere more significant than in the detective story, for here can be found the most profound engagement between Poe’s material imagination and the developing capitalist economy.

I. MINOR MURDERS Although “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is widely acknowledged to be the first detective story, I shall begin with a simpler tale by Poe called “Thou Art the Man.”6 It does not fit the pattern of Poe’s more famous tales of ratiocination, but as Howard Haycraft observes, it affords “a startling prognostication of the mechanics of the present-day detective story.”7 The narrative opens with the mysterious disappearance of the richest man in Rattleborough. Barnabas Shuttleworthy—no doubt the owner of a textile mill in this New England town—left home on horseback several days earlier and has not been heard from since. A crowd of anxious citizens turns to Charlie Goodfellow, a newcomer in town who has nevertheless become Shuttleworthy’s dearest companion and Rattleborough’s most beloved citizen. Following Goodfellow’s counsel, the whole borough forms a search party. Pennifeather, the unsociable nephew of the missing man, tries to convince the people to disperse throughout the adjacent countryside to make their search more efficient, but Good-

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fellow convinces them to stay together so they can seek out and interpret clues collectively. They soon discover the bloody scene of the crime. They also find a number of clues, all of which indicate that Pennifeather has committed the murder, no doubt to expedite the inheritance of his uncle’s wealth. Everybody accepts this solution except the narrator, who secretly plots to expose the real murderer— none other than Charlie Goodfellow—at a party hosted by Goodfellow for all the residents of the town. The narrator retrieves the corpse, stuffs a whalebone down its throat, and folds it over in a wine crate so that the body will spring upward upon removal of the lid. When the crate is opened at the party, the corpse rises up, and the narrator, who is also a skilled ventriloquist, has the resurrected body accuse Goodfellow with the words, “Thou art the man.” Goodfellow, completely overcome, admits his guilt and falls dead on the spot. For the people of Rattleborough, the party is over. Pennifeather is released from jail and inherits his uncle’s fortune. This primitive tale reveals the general tendency of detective fiction to reduce social questions of justice to scientific questions of fact: that is why the cases never go to court. As the image of a crowd searching for clues demonstrates, however, the detective story resists not only the asking of social questions but more specifically the collective production of answers. This rejection of popular judgment seems inherent in the very structure of the tale. When Poe’s narrator solves the crime, he shows that the crowd must rely on a source outside itself—namely an independent intellectual—for a correct interpretation of available information. In addition, the narrator’s solution prevents the diversion or redistribution of wealth, for Goodfellow surely would have spread his money liberally among the townspeople. Seen in this light, Poe seems to have invented the detective story as a kind of ideological intervention in a new and threatening social environment. In the same year that he composed “Thou Art the Man” and “The Purloined Letter,” Poe in fact announced that popular fiction could help control the behavior of the urban masses: [I]t is the fashion to decry the “fashionable” novels. These works have their demerits; but a vast influence which they exert for an undeniable good, has never yet been duly considered. . . . Now, the fashionable novels are just the books which most do circulate among the unfashionable class; and their effect in softening the worst callosities—in smoothing the most disgusting asperities of vulgarism, is prodigious. With the herd, to admire and to attempt imitation are the same thing. What if, in this case, the manners imitated are frippery; better frippery than brutality. (ER, 1337)

Always wary of groups—whether editorial cliques or Tsalal natives—Poe in the 1840s grew increasingly concerned with urban crowds. For him the congregation of people in cities threatened not only order and decorum but reason itself. After demonstrating the incompetence of the search party in “Thou

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Art the Man,” Poe later developed a more precise articulation of the contradiction between reason and collective action. Writing for the June 1849 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger, he distinguishes between a people and a mob: “we shall find that a people aroused to action are a mob; and that a mob, trying to think, subside into a people” (ER, 1456). The link between control of the mob and ratiocination is further demonstrated by the actions of French attorney André-Marie-Jean-Jacques Dupin, one of the likely sources for Poe’s detective. According to Sketches of Conspicuous Living Characters of France, which Poe favorably reviewed, the French attorney had little trouble pacifying the Parisian masses: When the working classes appeared upon the public place, and sought to put their hands on the car of state, Dupin signified to them, without the least reserve, that they understood nothing about the matter, and sent them back to their shops.8

In light of such statements, it is no wonder that Ernest Mandel characterizes the majority of detective writers as “ultra-conservative upholders of the established order” (Delightful Murder, 121). As we have seen, however, the project of classifying Poe’s politics is fraught with difficulty, especially if we consider his penchant for duplicity and deceit. Indeed, Poe’s celebrated detective—C. Auguste Dupin—sometimes displays a shocking disregard for “the established order.” The major Dupin tales are “Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter,” but I shall conclude this phase of the investigation by considering one last minor murder, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.” The story is based directly on the sensational case of Mary Cecilia Rogers, who was murdered on or about July 25, 1841.9 Capitalizing on the widespread interest in the case, Poe used reports from the New York newspapers to construct “a series of nearly exact coincidences occurring in Paris” (Letters, 1:200). Though his ostensible object was to provide “an analysis of the true principles which should direct inquiry in similar cases,” he of course hoped that his investigation of the celebrated mystery would “excite attention” and, presumably, sell magazines. Though it failed to attain the notoriety of the other two Dupin tales, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” nevertheless affords some valuable insights into the development of the genre. The detective story, after all, cannot properly be identified as a form until at least the second instantiation, for only then is it possible to identify common or generic traits. In other words, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” could have served as the prototype of any number of narrative patterns, some of which might have completely dropped the theme of solving crimes, especially since Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter were not murdered by a human perpetrator but (merely) killed by an escaped orangutan. Thus the second Dupin tale could have dealt with two chums who track down escaped animals, or with an American in Paris who supports fallen aristocrats, or with a fallen aristocrat who reclaims his social standing by prov-


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ing that there is nothing criminal in the violent death of property owners. The narrator of “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” in fact seems put off by the very idea of a sequel, believing that he had completely fulfilled his design in the first Dupin story by faithfully depicting the “mental character” of his friend. “It did not occur to me that I should ever resume the subject,” says the reluctant narrator, but “late events . . . have startled me into some farther details, which will carry with them the air of extorted confession” (PT, 507). “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” provides further insights into the form because of its basis in actual events. When Poe was trying to sell the story in 1842, he emphasized fact over fiction, just as he had done at the beginning of Pym: “Under pretence of showing how Dupin unravelled the mystery of Marie’s assassination, I, in fact, enter into a very rigorous analysis of the real tragedy in New York” (Letters, 1:201). By 1845, however, Poe was engaged in a subtle retreat from the facts, perhaps because he feared that a real solution to the case would make his pretentious speculations appear ridiculous.10 In a footnote to a June 1845 republication of the tale, Poe tries to indemnify himself against a break in the case, pointing out that the story “was composed at a distance from the scene of the atrocity, and with no other means of investigation than the newspapers afforded.” Nevertheless, he cannot resist making claims on reality: “all argument founded upon the fiction is applicable to the truth: and the investigation of the truth was the object” (PT, 506). In his anonymous review of himself (October 1845), Poe again tries to have it both ways. On the one hand, he credits himself as the only person to have shed any light on a crime otherwise “shrouded in complete mystery.” On the other hand, he suggests that the tale is most important as an example of the ratiocinative method: “‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’—although in this, the author appears to have been hampered by facts—reveals the whole secret of their mode of construction. It is true that there the facts were before him—so that it is not fully a parallel—but the rationale of the process is revealed by it” (ER, 872). What stands out here is Poe’s emphasis on “the mode of construction.” He singles out the tale for revealing the secret—not of Mary Rogers’s death, but of how stories about such mysteries can be fabricated out familiar materials. In its capacity as a sequel, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” begins the process of selecting the thematic and structural elements that will ultimately characterize the genre. As in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Dupin is called upon to solve a violent crime which baffles everyone, and in both cases the crime has somehow agitated the public and threatened the social order. Crime and politics seem nearly interchangeable in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”; as the narrator indicates, during “the discussion of this one momentous theme, even the momentous political topics of the day were forgotten” (PT, 509). As in the first story, Dupin makes sense out of a conflicting mass of information and thereby leads the city out of confusion and impending chaos. In both stories,

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the narrator also plays a mediating role between common intelligence— whether of the police or of the public—and the extreme brilliance of Dupin. This in turn fosters a structural identification between reader and narrator, who are both presumably subordinate to Dupin in everything except wonder. In addition to repeating aspects of the first story, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” refines the characterization of urban life and intellectual labor. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” conjures up an unreal urban space where anything seems possible. “Enamored of the Night for her own sake,” Dupin and the narrator block out the light from their desolate chambers; reveling in their seclusion, the two indulge “wild whims with a perfect abandon” (PT, 401). When darkness falls, they cruise the city in search of anonymous delights: “Then we sallied forth into the streets, arm in arm, continuing the topics of the day, or roaming far and wide until a late hour, seeking, amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement which quiet observation can afford” (PT, 401). In “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” on the other hand, Dupin and the narrator seem far less smitten with the charms of urban life. Before undertaking the case, the two men had completely secluded themselves in their house for nearly a month. The narrator explains that they had been “engaged in researches” which “absorbed our whole attention” (PT, 510), but the story suggests other motivations for remaining indoors. The city is first of all a place of violence, and the narrator refers casually to the presence of criminal gangs and “the great frequency, in large cities, of such atrocities” as the murder of Marie Rogêt (PT, 510). The city is also woefully lacking in solitude and natural beauty: Those who know anything of the vicinity of Paris, know the extreme difficulty of finding seclusion. . . . Let anyone who, being at heart a lover of nature, is yet chained by duty to the dust and heat of this great metropolis—let any such one attempt, even during the weekdays, to slake his thirst for solitude amid the scenes of natural loveliness which immediately surround us. At every second step, he will find the growing charm dispelled by the voice and personal intrusion of some ruffian or party of carousing blackguards. He will seek privacy amid the densest foliage, all in vain. Here are the very nooks where the unwashed most abound—here are the temples most desecrate. With sickness of heart the wanderer will flee back to the polluted Paris as to a less odious because less incongruous sink of pollution. (PT, 541–42)

In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Poe represents Paris as a sophisticated and anonymous European metropolis, but in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” he abandons this favorable depiction because Paris must “coincide” with New York, the city where Mary Rogers died and where Poe endured the most crushing poverty of his career. Paris accordingly becomes a place of violence and overcrowding, a polluted haven for criminal gangs which offers few gratifications to Dupin’s refined taste. It has often been argued that Poe avoids American settings and themes, but the transformation of “Paris” from metropolitan


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playground to urban nightmare should help dispel the myth that Poe was “a man without a country.”11 Most importantly, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” subtly reconstructs the scene of intellectual production originally presented in “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Whereas Dupin had solved his first mystery to amuse himself and (secondarily) to exonerate an innocent man, he now works as a paid consultant to the police. Nothing in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” suggests that ratiocination might become a regular form of paid labor; Dupin earns no reward, and in the denouement the chagrined Prefect of Police affirms “the propriety of every person minding his own business” (PT, 431). Only in the second story does Dupin emerge as a paid “cynosure of policial eyes” (PT, 508), that is, as a nineteenth-century version of the independent expert or consultant. Dupin’s brilliance has become a marketable commodity, and as the narrator indicates, “the cases were not few in which attempt was made to engage his services at the Prefecture.” When the reward in the case of Marie Rogêt reaches 30,000 francs and still brings no result, the frustrated Prefect makes Dupin “a direct, and certainly a liberal proposition, the precise nature of which I do not feel myself at liberty to disclose” (PT, 511). The method of investigation has also changed. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Dupin stumbles upon the newspaper report of the murders and then spontaneously decides to visit the scene of the crime. In “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” his investigative labor is more systematic and more dependent on previously accumulated information. Dupin even relies on the narrator to gather his raw materials: “I procured, at the Prefecture, a full report of all the evidence elicited, and, at the various newspaper offices, a copy of every paper in which, from first to last, had been published any decisive information in regard to this sad affair” (PT, 511). In order to solve the crime, Dupin must approach the past through the mediation of a great “mass of information” (PT, 511) created by the organized labor of police officers and newspaper reporters.12 But instead of representing these intellectual workers as competitors, the story suggests that their accumulated information must remain “raw” or meaningless until it is processed by Dupin. In other words, Poe’s detective operates in the privileged and perhaps utopian niche between capital and labor, between the accumulated mass of information and the working masses accumulating in American cities. On the one hand, then, there would seem to be some basis to the ideological assault on detective fiction, for even the earliest examples of the genre betray a dim view of city dwellers: ruffians, rakes, impostors, bungling bureaucrats, gullible mobs, ambitious commoners, and of course slow-witted American expatriates. On the other hand, however, Poe’s detective fiction confronts and challenges the emergence of information as the form taken by capital in the signifying environment. This confrontation does not have to be inferred from the detective tale alone, for on numerous occasions Poe identified capital as an

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enemy of literature and literary producers. As an editor, Poe chafed at the control exercised by capital—personified as “fat” proprietors—over all aspects of the publishing industry.13 As a commercial writer, Poe extended his criticism from the owners of capital to physical capital itself. In his article on anastatic printing, for example, he explicitly advocated the elevation of “literary value” over “physical or mechanical value” because with this reversal “the wealthy gentleman of elegant leisure . . . will be forced to tilt on terms of equality with the poordevil author” (Works 14:158). Finally, as a writer of detective stories, Poe continued his endeavor to subdue or challenge the apparently independent power of information capital, chiefly by demonstrating how it was utterly worthless until “finished” by specialized intellectual labor.14 The literary implications of this struggle will be explored below, but the ideological lesson is straightforward: an enemy of the masses is not necessarily a friend to capital.

II. THE ORIGIN OF A FORM Whence do new literary forms arise? Are they the serendipitous creations of literary genius? Or are they the predictable consequences of evolving social conditions? Such questions are seldom innocent, for in topics ranging from “nation” to “language” to “people,” the debate over origins generally occurs in the distorting shadow of some contemporary struggle. Literature is no exception. One should therefore be suspicious of all aggrandizing references to the originator of a literary tradition, especially when such a founder serves as the norm which justifies the relegation or exclusion of minor writers.15 But should the origin of a form be discounted altogether, or can it, if only in retrospect, tell us something meaningful about the social conditions that bend us to our destiny? In what follows I affirm the latter position, first by disputing a general (Darwinian) theory of literary evolution, and then by considering the detective story as a test case in the history of literary forms. One of the boldest recent attempts to downplay the significance of literary origins comes from Franco Moretti, who develops a Darwinian theory of literary history that distinguishes between the random generation of new forms and the socially determined selection of “survivors.”16 Appropriately, Moretti begins his Darwinian argument with an attack on a new Lamarckian view of human history formulated by Stephen Jay Gould. In the following passage, cited by Moretti (“On Literary Evolution,” 262), Gould uses Lamarck to distinguish between cultural and biological history: Human cultural evolution, in strong opposition to our biological history, is Lamarckian in character. What we learn in one generation we transmit directly by teaching and writing.


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Moretti admits that, in regard to acquired traits, “human history is indeed Lamarckian,” but he disagrees with Gould over the relationship between variations and evolution. As Moretti explains, Lamarckian theory treats variations as being oriented toward some environmental condition and therefore “preferentially inclined toward adaptation,” whereas Darwin treats variations as “wholly random attempts among which nature later selects those with greater potentialities for adaptation” (“On Literary Evolution,” 262–63). In Gould’s refashioning of Lamarck, Moretti detects vestiges of a Hegelian dream in which human history is “an undivided development where problems only arise when solutions are already at hand.” Finding this view implausible, Moretti follows Darwin and divides literary history into two distinct stages: “Chance alone will be active in the first stage, in which rhetorical variations are generated; social necessity will preside over the second stage, in which variations are historically selected” (“On Literary Evolution,” 263). Now it would seem absurd for a critic writing “in the interest of materialism” to claim that the movie western, or the sonnet, or tragic drama originated by “chance,” especially in light of Marx’s famous distinction between animal and human production.17 Nevertheless, Moretti offers the Darwinian distinction between origin and selection as a strict scientific theory of culture, and to this extent his argument is fraught with logical and empirical inconsistencies. Among other things, Moretti’s argument tends toward circularity: literary “species” are selected because they are superior, and they are superior because they are selected. The distinction between chance and necessity is also problematic. The fact that social necessity may play a smaller role in literary innovation than in literary selection does not mean that the origin of a form is completely accidental. And even though an originator may not have foreseen the future course of a rhetorical variation, we should still investigate what motivated certain kinds of experimentation rather than others or, better still, what motivated any sort of experimentation in the first place. The detective tale offers a perfect opportunity to assess the relation between a specific publishing environment and a specific innovation in literary form. Three aspects of Poe’s publishing environment merit investigation: the nature of intellectual labor, the new conditions for literary production, and the new relations between the writer and the mass audience. Wherever science and the systematic accumulation of knowledge had abetted a bourgeois revolution, the intellectual ceased to be a repository of wisdom and became instead a storehouse of information. Poe was aware of this as a general cultural phenomenon, but he also drew from several specific examples when he devised his own model of the new intellectual. The Reverend John Bransby, master of the boarding school Poe attended in London, was noted for possessing a “fund of miscellaneous information.” Arthur Hobson Quinn speculates that Poe, “noticing how effective ‘miscellaneous information’ may be when given offhand, took Mr. Bransby as his model later in the acquiring of all

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kinds of valuable odds and ends of literary and scientific knowledge” (Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography, 72). André-Marie-Jean-Jacques Dupin possessed a similar reputation. According to Sketches of Conspicuous Living Characters of France, the French attorney was a consummate polymath: To judge from his writings, Dupin must be a perfect living encyclopædia. From Homer to Rousseau, from the Bible to the civil code, from the laws of the twelve tables to the Koran, he has read every thing, retained every thing; he knows so many and such different things, that it is not astonishing he only half digests what he knows. (224)

Poe expands upon this when he portrays the superior intellectual as a “helluo librorum” or devourer of books. Whereas the human encyclopedia might “half digest” what he knows, the helluo librorum consumes information and then transforms it into productive capital: “It is true that, in general, we retain, we remember to available purpose, scarcely one-hundredth part of what we read; yet there are minds which not only retain all receipts, but keep them at compound interest forever” (ER, 1318). As one might expect, however, this ideal of the helluo librorum merely served to compensate for a publishing environment that was in many ways hostile to intellectual labor. Tales such as “The Gold-Bug” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” for example, commence with reclusive aristocrats who pursue knowledge with a bitter and vengeful intensity. Instead of producing profit or enlightenment, they use their talents to wreak revenge upon the social order that had cast them out. Legrand accordingly uses the gold bug to “punish” the narrator, and Dupin cannot help gloating about having “defeated [the Prefect of Police] in his own castle” (PT, 595, 431). For Poe, the prospect of defeating or humiliating an intellectual rival was a recurrent fantasy. He decried false erudition as “the most sickening” vanity of the unlettered pedant, and he once proposed writing a magazine story about a young man who exposes a “flippant pretender to universal acquirement” by confronting him with an armful of books (ER, 102, 1440). What matters about Poe, however, is that he engaged in a similar confrontation with the publishing environment itself. If he had felt resentment only toward other writers, he scarcely would have conducted so intense an investigation into literary form and literary value. Since he sometimes perceived the entire publishing industry as a kind of enemy, he occasionally put aside his differences with other writers in order to mount broader attacks. In fact, Poe invoked the unity of writers as a class precisely when he denounced systemic or structural problems. He adopted this strategy, for example, when he lobbied for a new magazine to be controlled by a “coalition of writers” (Letters, 1:247), and when he decried democracy itself for neglecting “the right of property in a literary work.” According to Poe, “the autorial body is the most autocratic on the face of the earth. How, then, can those institutions even hope to be safe which systematically persist


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in trampling it underfoot?” (ER, 1375). Though “autorial body” seems to be a synonym for the literary elite, Poe consistently viewed solidarity among writers as a prerequisite to radical change in the republic of letters. Such a strategy might appear to be an endorsement of Jacksonian Democracy or collective action per se, but Poe avoided identification with the American masses by using foreign models. And when Poe reached back into the past for ideological weapons, he generally ignored the practical implications of class struggle and instead offered vague, rhapsodic paraphrases of revolutionary slogans. In an 1836 review of the British author Henry Chorley, for example, Poe portentously alludes to “the wide atmosphere of Revolution encircling us” and then issues his first battle cry against all those forces which compel writers to “succumb to the grossest materiality” (ER, 164). These examples suggest that the place to investigate Poe’s politics is not in his scattered pronouncements about Andrew Jackson or the Whigs or even abolitionists, but instead at the point of production itself, where he acknowledged his material ties to other writers and where he felt most intensely the pressures of economic necessity. New forms are created in the crucible of this necessity. As indicated in Chapter Two, Poe felt that he lived in an era characterized by a superabundance of “thinking material,” an era “forced upon the curt, the condensed, the well-digested in place of the voluminous” (ER, 1377). He also knew that the surplus of thinking material would have dire consequences for commercial writers: “The enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge, is one of the greatest evils of this age; since it presents one of the most serious obstacles to the acquisition of correct information.”18 The detective story responds to this predicament by creating a general climate of mystery where information is scarce and where the truth arises less from some “well-digested” quantity of thinking material than from the rare and unalienable skill of a thinking being. More than a simple reflection of bourgeois subjectivity, Poe’s tales of ratiocination confront a signifying environment where knowledge is not only a commodity, but more precisely a commodity whose value is imperiled by overproduction. In the United States the tendency toward overproduction in the publishing industry was more pronounced because of lax copyright laws, a widespread ideological commitment to the dissemination of “useful knowledge,” and a massive public and corporate investment in the national communications infrastructure. It is therefore inadequate to characterize Dupin as “the essential romantic hero” or to explain away Poe’s emphasis on the unknown by noting that “for romanticism, mystery is the condition of the world.”19 Poe’s romanticism must itself be seen against the background of its dialectical opposite, namely a historical situation that systematically extirpates mystery from the workplace and from the very texture of everyday life. The emergence of the detective story is therefore more complicated than the Darwinian model suggests. To say that forms emerge by chance and are only

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selected by context ignores the importance of repetition in establishing a literary form. As argued above, the detective story can only be called a form upon its second instantiation; despite numerous efforts to project the entire history of the detective novel back onto “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the tale of ratiocination only became a form when it had been repeated enough times to establish its generic elements. In the case of the detective story, of course, this selective process was somewhat skewed because Poe himself wrote two more Dupin tales, thereby transforming his own creation into the origin of a series, if not of a full-fledged genre. But in a larger sense, the origin of a literary form is always already selected, for the original must be selected for repetition— even if by the same author—before it can be retrospectively classified as the prototype of a new genre. Even if a single work could represent a form, there would still be problems with Moretti’s attempt to conflate natural and literary history. Aside from the fact that the theory of evolution concerns itself with a completely different object of study (biological species rather than cultural forms), Moretti neglects a crucial point in Gould’s Lamarckian argument. Moretti cites Gould’s statement about cultural transmission from one generation to the next, but he omits what follows: Acquired characters are inherited in technology and culture. Lamarckian evolution is rapid and accumulative. It explains the cardinal difference between our past, purely biological mode of change, and our current, maddening acceleration toward something new and liberating—or toward the abyss.20

Two facets of Gould’s argument are obscured by Moretti’s presentation. First, Gould refers to change rather than “Hegelian” progress. He does not believe, as Moretti asserts, that human history is “an undivided development where problems only arise when solutions are already at hand” (“On Literary Evolution,” 263). Instead, Gould merely says that Lamarckian theory explains, “by analogy only,” what the human species has accomplished “for better or worse” (The Panda’s Thumb, 83). Second and most importantly, Gould views the social accumulation of information as the distinguishing feature of human history. Marx also traces the central importance of “the general productive forces of the social mind,” and for him as well the key point about knowledge is that it accumulates outside of—and sometimes at the expense of—the individual human subject.21 Poe, it should be recalled, held similar views. One of his most interesting references to the frailty of the thinking subject appears in Thomas Wyatt’s Synopsis of Natural History, a work collecting (with some emendations) the writings of Lemmonnier and other naturalists. Poe helped Wyatt prepare the volume late in 1838; in his review of the book for Burton’s Poe remarks that “the useful spirit of the original [by Lemmonnier] has been preserved—and this we say from personal knowledge, and the closest inspection and collation.”22 It is impossible to say with certainty which portions were written or


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edited by Poe, but he probably prepared a chapter (derived from Cuvier) on the “Varieties of the Human Race.”23 This chapter contains the following description of the origin of writing: By means of this intelligence [man] alone, among all other beings, has been enabled to form for himself a language. Through this, fathers transmit to their children their experience, their ideas; and this heritage, in passing from generation to generation, always increased in its progress from the preceding generation, becomes at length a treasure which memory is no longer capable of preserving. This accumulation upon accumulation of facts gave birth to writing and then again to printing, the province of both of which is, to render language perceptible by the eye in all places and at all times.24

Cuvier describes “language and letters” as an “indefinite source of perfection,” but he says nothing about the origin of writing. The author of the above passage, in contrast, views writing as the result of the inadequacy of individual memory when confronted with a vast and expanding accumulation of facts.25 Although the intellectual heritage is described as a “treasure,” writing and especially printing appear as symptoms of a signifying environment in which the individual has forever lost the capacity to grasp the totality of knowledge. We might add, then, that the “accumulation upon accumulation of facts” which gave birth to printing also inspired the creation of the detective story. The new form responded not merely to “society” in a general sense but specifically to an emerging tendency that imperiled literary labor and signification itself, namely the tendency toward overproduction, which left many observers “astonished that human thought or human industry could have produced such an accumulation.”26 The detective story therefore challenges notions of an autonomous realm for art because it registers the crisis of accumulation in its form as well as its content. Far from being a chance event, the emergence of a literary form constitutes the zero degree of mediation between culture and society. For this reason the detective story registers—almost against Poe’s critical principles—the evolving relationship between writer and mass audience. Raymond Williams has observed that during the crucial years of British Romanticism, the bond between writers and readers was undergoing fundamental changes, and “a different habitual attitude toward the ‘public’ was establishing itself.” Keats accordingly proclaimed that he lacked the “slightest feel of humility toward the Public”; Shelley refused to accept any “counsel from the simple-minded”; and Wordsworth denounced the “small though loud portion of the community, ever governed by factitious influence, which, under the name of the PUBLIC, passes itself upon the unthinking, for the PEOPLE.”27 As we have seen, Poe displays a similar habitual attitude in his disparagement of the mob, in his attacks on the practice of “puffing” inferior authors, and in his general skepticism toward popularity as a measure of literary value. The detective story, however, is expressly designed to be popular among those readers

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whom Poe least respects. In his review of himself, Poe notes that “The Fall of the House of Usher” is especially favored “among literary people—though with the mass, the ‘Gold-Bug,’ and ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ are more popular, because of their unbroken interest, novelty of the combination of ordinary incident, and faithful minuteness of detail” (ER, 871). Rufus Griswold would later concur with this assessment of the popularity of the tales of ratiocination. Writing in 1847, he remarked that “the analytical subtlety and the singular skill shown in the management of revolting and terrible circumstances in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ produced a deep impression, and made this story perhaps the most popular that Mr. Poe has written.”28 In his quest for popularity through ratiocination, Poe sometimes modified or abandoned his professed mistrust of public opinion. In “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” Dupin even goes so far as to celebrate the collective wisdom of the multitude: Now, the popular opinion, under certain conditions, is not to be disregarded. When arising of itself—when manifesting itself in a strictly spontaneous manner—we should look upon it as analogous with that intuition which is the idiosyncrasy of the individual man of genius. In ninety-nine cases from the hundred I would abide by its decision. But it is important that we find no palpable traces of suggestion. The opinion must be rigorously the public’s own. . . . (PT, 539)

In this case, of course, Dupin is free to disregard the popular opinion because it has been shaped by misleading newspaper reports. It is also important to note that the public can only be trusted where there is no possibility of deception or false suggestion—in short, where there is no need for ratiocination. The compliment therefore turns out to be rather backhanded, and in his personal correspondence, Poe admits that the detective story itself manipulates popular opinion. Writing to Philip Pendleton Cooke in 1846, Poe describes how the public has been duped by Dupin: “You are right about the hairsplitting of my French friend:—that is all done for effect. These tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious—but people think them more ingenious than they are—on account of their method and air of method” (Letters, 2:328). In other words, Poe expected that most readers would be mystified by the detective tales. As with “The Gold-Bug,” these tales refuse the sympathetic bond between reader and writer which Poe believed to be the basis for all genuine aesthetic experience. A form purporting to dispel all mystery ends up concealing from the mass audience “the more delicate pulses of the heart’s passion” (ER, 581). As we shall see in the next section, Poe’s major detective tales refuse not only sympathy but also the obligation to convey some useful information. In so doing the tales combine—if only to violate more efficiently—the inner laws of aesthetic appreciation and the horrid laws of political economy.


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III. MUCH MADE OF NOTHING Early in March 1841, printers Barrett & Thrasher were busy in their shop at No. 33 Carter’s Alley, Philadelphia. After setting an article called “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” into type for the upcoming April issue of Graham’s, they threw the original manuscript into the wastebasket. A young apprentice printer named W. J. Johnston later retrieved it from the trash and carried it home with him that evening (Poe Log, 319). As he examined the manuscript in his lodgings, he may have noticed that it was in a rather untidy condition, which perhaps explains why Barrett & Thrasher disposed of it so unceremoniously. Three years later, Poe produced another disorderly manuscript. In a letter to Edward L. Carey, publisher of the Gift, he asked to examine the proof copy of “The Purloined Letter.” “I am not,” he explained, “usually, solicitous about proofs; but in this instance, the MS. had many interlineations and erasures, which may render my seeing one, necessary” (Letters, 2:706). It was extraordinary for Poe, who viewed chirography as an indication of character,29 to submit text in such poor shape. According to Mabbott, “most of his printer’s copy was carefully prepared and unusually clean”; the poor condition of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter,” he observes, can be found in “no other surviving manuscript of a Poe story.”30 Without delving into Poe’s theory of autography, it is possible to draw some provisional conclusions from this. First, he probably wrote the tales very quickly, indicating that he knew how they would end from the start (this is what he really meant by writing a story backwards). Second, the fact that he did not recopy them implies a certain habitual attitude toward this form of literature. Perhaps he felt that they did not warrant improvement, or perhaps he felt compelled to rush them to market, but whatever the reason he was anxious to dispose of the tales as quickly as possible.31 Finally, we may read in the hurried and automatic acts of the laborer something more profound—not about the laborer himself but about the productive process that summons him into existence. “Murders in the Rue Morgue” has long been touted as the first detective story, and as such it has been subjected to extensive critical analysis. Although much criticism has centered on Dupin as a bourgeois individualist and on the police as a bungling bureaucracy,32 there has been comparatively little investigation of the social significance of the two necessary components of any crime: victim and perpetrator. John Cawelti and other mass cultural theorists have discussed the necessity for detective fiction to minimize reader identification with the victim, and Judith Fetterley has emphasized the prevalence of murdered women in Poe’s fiction.33 But something more about Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter emerges from the details that Poe carefully selects from the crime reports. To begin with, many residents of the Rue Morgue believe that Madame L’Espanaye was a fortune teller. Aside from its resemblance to

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the economic puns of “The Gold-Bug,” fortune telling is a mysterious art which in Poe’s time was being displaced by such “scientific” practices as autography and phrenology. One of the witnesses disputes the rumors about fortune telling, but Madame L’Espanaye certainly did not earn any money from rent. Although her house was large and in good condition, she “became dissatisfied with the abuse of the premises by her tenant, and moved into them herself, refusing to let any portion.” Madame L’Espanaye therefore lived alone on the fourth floor of the house, leaving the first three floors completely vacant. Finally, we must consider the money. One of the clues designed to disprove robbery as a motive is the wealth accumulated in the apartment. When the police arrived, they found old coins, jewels, and most importantly, 4000 francs in gold, which Madame L’Espanaye had withdrawn from her bank three days before her murder. Like the house, the money is potential capital that the idiosyncratic Madame L’Espanaye refused to put into productive circulation. This estrangement from productive society makes it possible to reconsider the status of the two women. There is an old woman who believes in magic but not in capitalism, and a young woman who has failed to enter the sexual economy through marriage. In other words, the house defines a space that is oppositional to both capitalism and patriarchy, and if the women who inhabit the space make unsympathetic victims, it is partly due to their distance from the dominant social order. As one of the witnesses observes, “the two lived an exceedingly retired life” (PT, 407). When the victims are described in these terms, the logical perpetrator would be some agent of capitalism, and in fact the police arrest Adolphe Le Bon, clerk at the bank from which Madame L’Espanaye withdrew the 4000 francs.34 The arrest of Le Bon draws added significance when Dupin explains his own motives for wanting to solve the crime. As he tells the narrator, he will unravel the mystery, first because it will afford him amusement, and secondly because the bank clerk has rendered Dupin an unidentified service for which he is still grateful. If the victim and suspect encode larger political or economic conflicts, it only fair to inquire about Dupin’s social position. In establishing Poe rather than Voltaire or E.T.A. Hoffmann as the originator of the detective story, critics often point to the relatively recent emergence of detection as a line of work. As Howard Haycraft puts it, “Clearly, there could be no detective stories until there were detectives. . . . The first systematic experiments in professional crime-detection were naturally made in the largest centers of population, where the need was greatest. And so the early 1800s saw the growth of criminal investigation departments in the police systems of great metropolises, such as Paris and London.”35 Clive Bloom extends this notion of the detective as paid professional, depicting Dupin as someone who uses his intellect as capital and who “always works only for money.”36 Like Haycraft, Bloom explores the link between the emergence of a literary form and some phenomenon of


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economic history, though for him what matters is not the birth of a new profession, which can be dated quite precisely, but instead a broader ensemble of social practices grouped loosely together under the rubric of capitalism. Yet both Haycraft and Bloom erroneously project the events of later Dupin stories back on to the first, for in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Dupin does not work for money and cannot be classified as a professional detective. He takes his first case as a lark, seeking only amusement and (secondarily) the exoneration of the bank clerk Le Bon. After forming a hypothesis about the deaths of Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter, Dupin commences a spirited quest for truth rather than a calculated search for wealth. At the end of the story, the owner of the orangutan offers him a financial reward, but Dupin is after something else: “My reward shall be this. You shall give me all the information in your power about these murders in the Rue Morgue” (PT, 427). In other words, Dupin uses his “means of information about this matter” (PT, 428) to accumulate yet more information, a strategy that accords perfectly with the analogy Poe elsewhere draws between the semi-autonomous realms of capital and thought: “knowledge breeds knowledge, as gold gold” (ER, 1318). Only in Poe’s later detective tales do the discrete realms of capital and thought blend into one. In “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” Dupin refuses to work without a contract, and in “The Purloined Letter,” Dupin pursues the letter for its cash value rather than its truth content, so that knowledge breeds gold instead of further knowledge. The new detective therefore stands in a fundamentally different relation to knowledge, state power, and production itself. Like a prototypical data processor, Dupin ultimately ends up as a conduit for information that can bring him no enlightenment. It is hard to overestimate the literary and social importance of Dupin’s transition from free thinker to hired intellectual. To grasp how radical a break Poe makes with the ideology of universal enlightenment, it is useful to turn for contrast to Richard D. Brown’s account of information diffusion in antebellum America.37 Among other things, Brown explores “the ideal of universal information in the enlightened republic” through the exemplary life of William Bentley, a Congregational minister who was, with Thomas Jefferson, one of the preeminent polymaths of his age. Unlike such figures as Jefferson and Franklin, however, Bentley neglected original or creative work in order to devote himself almost entirely to the collection and dissemination of already existing knowledge. His compulsion to know “everything about everything” (Knowledge Is Power, 198) fed a complementary compulsion to inform everyone about everything. To acquire his knowledge of the world, Bentley drew from many sources: periodicals, books from many countries (he read twenty languages), and conversations with all manner of people, especially merchants and foreign visitors.38 Bentley distributed this information in correspondence, sermons, social interactions, and perhaps most notably in a biweekly news digest that ran for nearly twenty-five years in the Salem newspapers.

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Near the end of his life, Bentley became less optimistic about the possibility of achieving a republic of perfect information. Distressed at newspaper sensationalism, in 1796 he denounced a “licentious press” and vowed to “communicate everything to the public, which has in our judgement the truth, happiness, usefulness, or good government as its object” (Knowledge Is Power, 214). Despite his best efforts, Bentley’s goal became increasingly difficult “in an era when the volume and variety of information were expanding dramatically” (217). Though Brown does not recognize the immanent contradiction between information and enlightenment, the ideological foundation of Bentley’s project was clearly most imperiled at the very moment when technological conditions should have been most favorable. As Brown observes, “A shadow was falling across his own bright hopes for a free press as the foundation of an informed population. Indeed in an era when information and the media presenting it were increasing at an explosive rate, Bentley was unrealistic to have supposed that multitudes of citizens would have the inclination and ability to inform themselves broadly according to the ideal of the genteel cosmopolitan” (215). In other words, a society characterized by a “superabundance” of information would ultimately render impossible both the enlightened republic and the polymath who best embodied it. Poe’s fiction is nevertheless replete with polymaths. In his gothic tales he depicts his most sublime polymath in the figure of Ligeia; in his satires he ridicules pseudo-polymaths who construct their seeming knowledge out of scissors and paste; his in “Pinakidia” and “Marginalia” Poe himself plays a polymath very much like Bentley when he assembles copious selections of useful and entertaining knowledge. But the greatest polymath of all is Dupin. With the possible exception of Ligeia, Dupin is the character who comes closest to knowing “everything about everything”; from his first appearance in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” we are encouraged to marvel at “the vast extent of his reading” and to view his mind as “a treasure beyond price” (PT, 400). The crucial difference between Dupin and other polymaths—the list would include Jefferson, Franklin, Bentley, and Poe’s old schoolmaster Nicholas Bransby—is that Dupin refuses to share his information. Despite the paternalism implicit in the republican visions of Bentley and Jefferson, each believed in the need for an enlightened citizenry. They of course assumed a close connection between enlightenment and productivity, but they did not yet conceive of information as something which re-entered the production process directly. Although Jefferson and other polymaths would often treat educated people as “human capital,” they did so from the perspective of the nation as a whole rather than from the perspective of a capitalist economy. Poe, who studied at Jefferson’s university, no doubt recognized the republican tradition behind the ideal and the ideology of “universal information.” More importantly, he was aware of the many new attempts to institutionalize the individual efforts of the great polymaths.39 Aside from the educational societies


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and circulating libraries that were springing up everywhere, the legacy of the French philosophes was embodied in the many American encyclopedia projects.40 But although Poe’s Dupin is himself a walking encyclopedia, he utterly lacks the ideological commitment which animated Bentley and Jefferson. When the narrator first encounters Dupin, he notes that the fallen aristocrat has “ceased to bestir himself in the world” (PT, 400). “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” shows the pair in a similar condition of isolation: “Strange as it may appear, the third week from the discovery of the body had passed, and passed without any light being thrown upon the subject, before even a rumor of the events which had so agitated the public mind, reached the ears of Dupin and myself. Engaged in researches which had absorbed our whole attention, it had been nearly a month since either of us had gone abroad, or received a visiter, or more than glanced at the leading political articles in the daily papers” (PT, 510). In short, Dupin is a polymath who has turned his back on the public and who harbors no desire to disseminate his knowledge. “The Purloined Letter” reveals the material basis for Dupin’s reticence. Whereas “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” had at least made a perfunctory nod to “the popular opinion,” “The Purloined Letter” displays an unmistakable disregard for the masses. In this tale, of course, the issue is not the murder of commoners but high level intrigue involving a state minister, a stolen letter, and “a personage of the most exalted station” (PT, 682). The theft of the letter threatens the stability of the state, but unlike the crimes of earlier tales it does not stimulate the formation of a potentially violent urban mob. Strangely, it is Dupin himself who conjures the mob into existence. In order to distract the minister, Dupin hires a man to act the part of a lunatic and to fire a musket (without a ball) into a crowd of women and children. This produces the desired effect, for through the window Dupin and the Minister hear “a series of fearful screams, and the shoutings of a mob” (PT, 697). Whereas in the first tale Dupin had exercised his ingenuity to disperse the mob, the hired detective employs his ingenuity to arouse and exploit the crowd, giving little thought to the consequences. Dupin’s attitude is most clearly demonstrated when he discounts the popular esteem of mathematical reason with a quotation from Chamfort: “Il y a à parier que toute idée publique, toute convention reçue, est une sottise, car elle a convenue au plus grand nombre” (PT, 691). [You can bet that all popular ideas and received conventions are stupid, because they’ve been accepted by the masses.] But even if Dupin were devoted to mass enlightenment, the special circumstances of the case would forbid any public disclosure. Whereas both “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” conclude with a dissemination of Dupin’s findings, “The Purloined Letter” ends with Dupin telling only the narrator, and not even the narrator learns the contents of the letter. Poe has therefore grasped the value of information, but he has done so from the standpoint of the producer. His evolving attitude toward the value of

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information can be seen in the difference between “Pinakidia” and the “Marginalia.” In “Pinakidia” Poe is, rather like Bentley and Jefferson, willing to disseminate information useful to other writers, a strategy which aids his competitors and perhaps the nation as a whole, but which gains him little in return. In the “Marginalia” Poe turns this concept of value on its head. The introduction to the series explicitly confounds the prevailing belief in useful information: “the purely marginal jottings, done with no eye to the Memorandum Book, have a distinct complexion, and not only a distinct purpose, but none at all; this is what imparts to them a value” (ER, 1309). The perversion of value attains its fullest realization in the tales of ratiocination, for these embody Poe’s longstanding dream of a culture of surfaces where the raw material for literary production (variously dubbed truth or information) may be easily obtained by the writer of genius. As early as 1831 Poe had argued that the greatest truths are found in “palpable places” rather than “huge abysses”41; “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” elevates this preference for “palpable places” into a methodological principle. In the story Dupin criticizes Vidocq—his rival from real life—for the “intensity of his investigations.” By holding the object of study too close, Vidocq “lost sight of the matter as a whole,” and this myopia prompts Dupin to restate the case for a culture of surfaces: “Thus there is such a thing as being too profound. Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial” (PT, 412). “The Purloined Letter” takes the culture of surfaces one step further. At a basic level, the concept of superficial truth serves to elevate Dupin by depreciating the labor of his intellectual competitors. The Parisian police work hard, but they are limited by the fact that “their own ingenuity is a faithful representative of that of the mass” (PT, 690). In other words, Dupin contends, their method depends “not at all upon acumen, but altogether upon the mere care, patience, and determination of the seekers” (PT, 691). This disparagement of “mere care, patience, and determination” must be understood in the context of a political economy that emphasized the broad dissemination of objectified information rather than the education or cultivation of a few intellectuals. Poe, who repeatedly lobbied for better copyright laws and higher pay for authors, was painfully aware that he worked in a signifying environment suffering from a surplus of both information and intellectual workers.42 The culture of surfaces elegantly responds to the crisis in the signifying environment, first by devaluing “deep meaning” in favor of a superficial realm of knowledge, and then by making this realm the special province of the writer of genius, whose ability “to seek . . . and to seize truth upon the surface of things” elevates him above the mass of merely industrious writers.43 If we understand capital as both the industrial base of the publishing industry and the rapidly accumulating supply of thinking material, and if we understand “labor” as both the “poor devil authors” Poe competed with and the anonymous mass audience he so


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mistrusted, then the culture of surfaces appears not as an attempt to resolve the structural antagonism between capital and labor in favor of one class or another, but instead as a symbolic attempt to abolish capitalist production altogether by establishing a signifying environment where writers assume material dominion over all.44 As demonstrated in the next chapter, this fantasy— dimly adumbrated in the detective story—receives grandiose expression in Poe’s angelic dialogues. In any event, Poe revealed his general disenchantment with the prevailing relations of production on numerous occasions, especially in his calls for an international copyright agreement, in his comments on the magazine business, and in his excessive optimism over the radical potential of new inventions like the daguerreotype or anastatic printing.45 It must be emphasized that in all these instances Poe attacks the relations of production, and as such his critique extends beyond politics narrowly so-called to confront more fundamental social practices. This is most clearly demonstrated in “The Purloined Letter.” At the same time that Poe disparages the masses and shores up the dominant political order (in this case a monarchy), he also smuggles into his ratiocination an astonishingly radical critique of value. In an inverted world where truth is most concealed when it is most revealed, Poe offers a tale where, as he slyly insinuates in his review of himself, “there is much made of nothing” (ER, 872). This inversion of production is explicitly noted in the story: “The present peculiar condition of affairs at court . . . would render the instant availability of the document—its susceptibility of being produced at a moment’s notice— a point of nearly equal importance with its possession.” “Its susceptibility of being produced?” said I. “That is to say, of being destroyed,” said Dupin.

Dupin and the narrator mean to say the letter must be nearby so that the Minister could, in a pinch, quickly dispose of the evidence. The two of them instead end up playing upon, or confounding, the difference between production and destruction. In his account of the letter’s value, Poe likewise rejects the democratic faith in universal enlightenment. This is how the narrator links the letter with power: “It is clear,” said I, “as you observe, that the letter is still in the possession of the minister; since it is this possession, and not the employment of the letter, which bestows the power. With the employment the power departs.” (PT, 683)

According to the classic theory of supply and demand, overproduction would affect information in the same way that it would affect any other commodity— it would drive its price down to zero. But in Poe’s inverted world, a fall in exchange value is also accompanied by a corresponding decline in use-value or

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utility. If the contents of the letter were published, if the personal affairs of a certain exalted personage were to become common knowledge, then this information would lose its special utility, namely the political power it confers on its possessor. If this were also true of information in general, it would imperil all hopes for an enlightened republic. Exponents of the society of perfect information generally assume the possibility of an absolute increase in civility, wisdom, and most especially productivity.46 Poe shatters this assumption with two swift retorts from the dismal science. First he depicts a zero-sum society where all gains are offset by relative losses somewhere else, where knowledge affords a competitive advantage only amongst the ignorant. Second, he insists that the possessor of information, like the owner of any other commodity, is legally and morally entitled to sell it only to the highest bidder. From the macroeconomic perspective of the nation, Bentley was an information hero, but from the microeconomic perspective of producers, he was a fool. As indicated by Dupin’s anecdote of the rich miser who tries to wheedle free medical advice (PT, 687–88), Poe wants to ensure that intellectuals receive compensation for their labor. He especially wants to combat the tendency of intellectual workers to give away their productions, whether in the form of spoken advice or as literature properly so called. Poe of course was not alone in this. In the same year that “The Purloined Letter” was published, a writer in the Weekly Mirror actually lamented the fact that authors did not treat their texts like other commodities: “What a butcher would think of veal, as a marketable commodity, if everybody had an ambition to raise calves to give away, is very near the conclusion that a merely business man would arrive at, in inquiring into the saleableness of fugitive literature.”47 Whether out of desperation or perversity, Poe sometimes attacked a social formation regulated by the laws of political economy by making those laws universal. Tales of ratiocination like “The Purloined Letter” accordingly reproduce, at the level of form, the lived contradiction between the society of perfect information and a signifying environment where information functions as a commodity or, more precisely, as capital itself. Aside from banishing all profundity or metaphysical depth, then, the culture of surfaces would ultimately subject all knowledge to market forces. As Marx would say, the culture of surfaces heralds “the time of general corruption, of universal venality, or, to speak in terms of political economy, the time when everything, moral or physical, having become marketable value, is brought to the marketplace to be assessed at its truest value.”48 Though this seems a rather improbable solution to the predicament of the antebellum author, it actually represents Poe’s calculated response to the overproduction of information, a fact made clear by his curious yet consistent advocacy of superficial knowledge.49 And although the detective tale risks subjecting all signification to the laws of commerce, it also renders everything—from the broken nail in the window casement to the


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pasteboard card-rack on the mantel piece—an object of extreme fascination, if only because every inconspicuous detail might be the first link in a signifying chain leading to great wealth. But although he invoked the virtues of commerce in imaginary realms, Poe had little practical faith in the laws of political economy. In “The Philosophy of Furniture,” for example, he rejects the very premise of the culture of surfaces when he complains that “the cost of an article of furniture has at length come to be, with us, nearly the sole test of its merit” (PT, 383). Further doubt emerges from his lifelong view of poetry (rather than the tale) as the highest field of artistic endeavor. For one thing, Poe frequently implied that poetry was inconsistent with a life of money getting, though it should be noted that his position was not entirely consistent.50 More important is Poe’s intimation of a contradiction between the poetic sentiment and the rights of property. In one of his last and most conciliatory articles on Longfellow’s alleged plagiarisms, Poe magnanimously admits that the poetic sentiment “implies a peculiarly, perhaps abnormally keen appreciation of the beautiful, with a longing for its assimilation, or absorption into the poetic identity” (ER, 758). After a poet “assimilates” a poem, “he thoroughly feels it as his own,” and years later this assimilation can give rise to acts of unintentional plagiarism. Poe goes on to draw a direct correlation between the magnitude of poetic sentiment and the susceptibility to “poetic impression,” so that “for the most frequent and palpable plagiarisms, we must search the works of the most eminent poets” (ER, 759). This effectively turns the concept of literary property on its head. If poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty (as Poe argues in “The Rationale of Verse”), and if beauty inherently subverts the proprietary status of literature because of its susceptibility to “assimilation,” then one can only conclude that poetry is theft. As we shall see in the following chapter, the line between theft and poetic inspiration is never clearly drawn, not even in Poe’s most sublime creations. In the tales of ratiocination, however, sublimity is out of the question. Instead of fleeing beyond the space and time of capitalist regulation, the Dupin tales look forward to a culture where emergent economic tendencies have become dominant. It is this very strategy of intensification which plants the seeds of instability and disintegration. That is to say, Poe’s attempt to universalize the horrid laws of political economy gives rise to a culture of surfaces, but this is always on the verge of being transformed into its dialectical opposite, namely a culture of collective meaning where the laws of political economy are universally violated. The detective story therefore represents Poe’s most profound response to the transformation of the publishing industry and the birth of a vaguely ominous mass audience. Stories like “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” attempt to outwit the crisis of overproduction in the literary market by imagining the reverse situation—a social crisis caused by a scarcity of information. This scarcity of information enables intellectuals like Dupin to

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overcome the power of capital and to escape artistic annihilation at the hands of the anonymous urban masses. In the first detective story, however, Dupin does not yet sell the product of his intellectual labor to the highest bidder; he instead relies on the patronage of his American sidekick. The lingering reliance on patronage comes to an end in “The Purloined Letter,” a tale which not only denies the triumph of literary over market value, but which also questions whether the mass cultural text can be the bearer of any socially useful meaning whatsoever. Regardless of what it may have meant to a certain exalted personage, the stolen letter retains its power only so long as its contents remain secret. By the inner logic of both the tale and the emerging relations of production, information would lose all value the instant it became common knowledge.

Chapter Nine THE INVESTIGATING ANGEL POE, BABBAGE, AND “THE POWER OF WORDS” To those, nevertheless, cunning in the stars, it was not unknown that the heavens wore an aspect of ill. . . . The peculiar spirit of the skies, if I mistake not greatly, made itself manifest, not only in the physical orb of the earth, but in the souls, imaginations, and meditations of mankind. (Poe, “Shadow—A Parable”) I explained that in terms of services available to the ordinary man in 1830, England at least had achieved Communism. . . . When travel and information and education services are available to the ordinary person, that is Communism. It happened long before Karl Marx. Such service environments are invisible to accountants and actuaries and bankers who deal in double entries and political arithmetic which conceal technological and environmental realities completely. Today, with the multi-billion dollar service environments available to everybody, almost for free, (these include the massive educational and information worlds of advertising) it means that we have plunged very deeply into tribal communism on a scale unknown in human history. (Marshall McLuhan to Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands, May 14, 1969)1

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EAR THE beginning of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Dupin demonstrates his analytical power by completing a thought that had been silently evolving inside the narrator’s brain. By studying the sequence of facial expressions made by his American friend, Dupin has been able to reconstruct a wondrous chain of associations and to trace these associations back to a chance mishap with a Parisian fruit vender. Dupin’s achievement is all the more remarkable in light of the seemingly haphazard nature of the narrator’s musings, which flit from paving-stones to Epicurean atoms to the stars of Orion, coming to rest at length upon a poor actor named Chantilly. Amazed that his ostensibly secret meditations should be so transparent, the narrator begs Dupin to explain “the method—if method there is—by which you have been enabled to fathom my soul in this matter.” As it turns out, of

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course, Dupin’s method consists precisely of fathoming soul from surface, which affords further evidence of a presumptive complicity between mind and matter, or between the sublime world of literary creation and the bottom line of literary production. The complicity between mind and matter is central to the detective story, but curiously, it also colors those tales that are most deservedly characterized as being “out of space, out of time.” Poe’s best example of extraterrestrial writing is “The Power of Words,” the last of his so-called angelic dialogues. Though greatly overshadowed by other works, “The Power of Words” has been described as the single most important document “for understanding Poe’s philosophy and romanticism in general.”2 It is indeed an important text, but as we shall see, it is important for very different reasons. Appropriately enacted in the depths of space, the dialogue illustrates the fantastic notion that human speech leaves behind permanent material impressions, which can be “read” by mathematically gifted angels. In this speculative conclusion, I shall trace “The Power of Words” back to its earthly source. In the course of doing so, I shall attempt to show how “The Power of Words” is itself embedded in a wondrous chain of associations leading from Poe to the stars and then back to Charles Babbage, pioneer of the modern computer and patron saint of the information age. My argument begins by identifying Babbage’s Ninth Bridgewater Treatise as the likely inspiration for “The Power of Words.” If the claim is correct, there are a number of consequences for the study of Poe and his culture. Aside from linking Poe to yet another polymath, the identification of this source demonstrates that Poe’s dream of a material language, most fully realized in “The Power of Words,” derives from the work of a scientist and economist rather than from the ruminations of an impractical romantic visionary. This of course shows that Poe’s angelic dialogues are not as distant from earthly affairs as previously assumed. But it also suggests that Poe’s abiding concern with materiality—of language, spirit, and the self—emerged in response to a different kind of materiality, namely the socioeconomic conditions of production in antebellum America. And finally—if I may be pardoned for proceeding so rapidly to take in the entire prospect—the link to Babbage shows something of the startling openness and modernity of Poe’s world. As demonstrated below, Babbage’s invention of the computing machine called the Difference Engine, nearly lost and then rediscovered in the twentieth century, is largely responsible for his current reputation as progenitor of the modern information economy. Poe’s familiarity with The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, coupled with long years spent in the crisis-ridden publishing industry, would have afforded him a glimpse beyond the surfaces of his own era, a glimpse of the deeper currents that still carry us into the future. For all of these reasons, “The Power of Words” may be taken as the final clue to Poe’s culture of surfaces. But there are other reasons—having as much to do with symmetry as with substance—why this minor tale serves as a fitting

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end to our investigation. Whereas “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is the first of Poe’s three Dupin tales, “The Power of Words” is the last of a series of three angelic dialogues whose importance and distinctiveness have been largely overlooked. And then there are the practical implications of Poe’s star-gazing. We began this study with Poe’s casual advice on contemplating the heavens. Finding fault with star-gazers who look “directly and intensely” into the nighttime sky, Poe suggests that someone who “surveys it less inquisitively is conscious of all for which the star is useful to us below” (PT, 14). This is an apt description of the kind of historicism practiced here, which turns recurrently away from literature to explore the full context or environment of signification in antebellum America.3 The link between Poe’s environment and the modern computer is partly serendipitous, since Babbage became the forerunner of the information age only in retrospect. But in many ways the antebellum publishing industry did herald the dawn of a new epoch, particularly if we consider the tumultuous period between 1837 and 1843, when a number of possible futures loomed on the horizon. This explains why responses to the period were so diverse. Lucian Minor, for example, anticipated the death of the traditional citizen-reader in a sea of surplus information; Jeremiah Reynolds foresaw an age when American industry would make “every atom . . . bear its greatest amount of value”; and as demonstrated by the epigraph to this chapter, Marshall McLuhan traced the “tribal communism” of service environments back to this same era. One way or another, Poe encompassed all of these views. At one moment Poe coolly explained the laws of political economy, while at another he devised a cosmology to transport himself beyond the bounds of capitalist regulation. In one instance he elevated sales over taste as a measure of literary value, while in another he lamented the degraded taste of the literate masses. And sometimes he saw the masses as an entity that would engulf his artistic soul, but on at least one occasion he imagined the “final ingathering” as a blissful apotheosis. These conflicting accounts are linked by a materialist thread, for in all his business ventures and literary experiments, Poe was somehow responding to the material conditions that summoned him into existence. As we have seen, these same material conditions diverted Poe from the path of the public-spirited intellectual and made him strangely indifferent to what Lucian Minor called “the pure wish to diffuse light and to do good.”4 Hence it is entirely fitting to conclude this study by reconsidering the power of words in an age of capitalist production.

. . . . . Thus far we have explored Poe’s earthly responses to the crisis of literary overproduction and to the dimming prospects for total knowledge. Aside from touting the truth of surfaces, Poe imagined new agents of social knowledge, ranging from the polymath Dupin to the hyper-proficient reader who could

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“retain all receipts” and “keep them at compound interest for ever.” Sometimes, however, mere humans would not do, so Poe went one step further by creating the angelic epistemologists of “The Power of Words.” First published in the June 1845 Democratic Review, the tale consists of a philosophical conversation between two celestial beings—Oinos, the inquiring novice, and Agathos, the knowing guide. Unlike Poe’s earlier angelic dialogues,5 “The Power of Words” pays scant attention to the transience of the earth and earthly existence. At the beginning of the story, Oinos awakens to immortality and immediately starts to question Agathos about the limits to knowledge and the nature of angelic happiness. Agathos’ reply uncannily corresponds to a capitalist signifying environment: “’not in knowledge is happiness, but in the acquisition of knowledge! In for ever knowing, we are for ever blessed, but to know all were the curse of a fiend”’ (PT, 822). By advancing this position, Agathos first construes the overwhelming mass of information as a great boon, and then he transforms total knowledge—the highest aspiration of Lucian Minor and other reformers—into the arch-enemy of inquiring minds. Next, Agathos hints that the infinite material universe exists primarily to fulfill the angelic desire for infinite inquiry: “There are no dreams in Aidenn—but it is here whispered that, of this infinity of matter, the sole purpose is to afford infinite springs, at which the soul may ally the thirst to know which is for ever unquenchable within it—since to quench it would extinguish the soul’s self” (PT, 822). Having once again fathomed soul from matter, Poe finally takes his angels on a strange excursion “into the starry meadows beyond Orion.” Here, amidst the glow of “triple-tinted suns,” Agathos propounds the fantastic theory that vibrations and impulses—especially the airborne vibrations of human speech—leave permanent impressions on the material universe. Not surprisingly, Poe scholars have taken pains to uncover likely sources for this deistic rhapsody on the omnipotence of the spoken word. Mabbott, intrigued by the tale’s epistemology, suggests that Poe may have been influenced by Thomas Moore’s Leaves of the Angels, which describes “the wish to know” as an “endless thirst” (Collected Works, 3:1211). Other commentators have focussed on the source for Agathos’ claim that every “impulse given the air, must, in the end, impress every individual thing that exists within the universe.” Sources for this have been more fervently sought, in part because the very status of the claim is uncertain. It could, for example, comprise a legitimate scientific hypothesis that Poe believes is literally true; or it could be a scientific hypothesis that an intrigued but skeptical Poe dramatizes; or it could be a kind of fable of Romantic power that Poe sincerely endorses (Tate, Levine and Levine); or it could be a fable of poetic power that a post-romantic Poe dramatizes with an indeterminate degree of irony and subversion (Williams, Riddel). Historical changes in what Thomas Kuhn calls “normal science” complicate matters even further, for whatever Poe’s contemporaries may have be-


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lieved, modern critics generally do not discuss the scientific basis of the tale without qualifying the hypothesis or impugning Poe’s scientific competence.6 The vast majority of modern critics accordingly see “The Power of Words” as a kind of myth or flight of fancy. Allen Tate, for example, sees the tale as “a fable,” which considers “the possibility of creative power through verbal magic,” but Tate accuses Poe of taking such magic beyond all limits: “This is not the same presumption as our own timid, superstitious reverence for an order of poetic language which creates its own reality, but rather a grandiose angelic presumption on the part of man” (“The Angelic Imagination,” 250). In support of this view, Tate suggests that Poe was influenced by a passage from Pascal’s Pensées: The slightest movement affects the whole of nature; a stone cast into the sea changes the whole face of it. So, in the realm of Grace, the smallest act affects the whole by its results. Therefore, everything has importance. In every action we must consider, besides the act itself, our present, past, and future conditions, and others whom it touches, and must see the connections of it all. And so we shall keep ourselves well in check.7

Tate puts the last sentence in italics to emphasize the amorality of Poe’s vision. According to Tate, “It almost seems as if Poe had just read this passage and had gone at once to his desk to begin ‘The Power of Words’; as if he had deliberately ignored the moral responsibility, the check upon human power.” As demonstrated by this brief survey, “The Power of Words” has occasioned two major interpretive conflicts, both of which turn upon Poe’s likely source for the tale. One conflict concerns the nature of Agathos’ theory—whether it should be viewed as science, hoax, romantic myth, or satire on romanticism. The second conflict involves the moral and political significance of the spoken word—whether speakers (and poets) should calculate the probable consequences of their words and censor themselves accordingly, or whether they may, like Agathos, give free expression to “the passions of the most turbulent and unhallowed of hearts” (PT, 825). The importance of such interpretive conflicts would be more obvious if Agathos had spoken a different world into existence, a world that embodied not romantic longing but overtly political ideas about race, gender, or social class. Then, presumably, modern readers would evaluate the scientific or ideological status of these ideas as well as the political consequences of Poe’s literary representation, which would in turn require a multitude of judgments about intention, irony, style, form, historical context, and so forth. But “The Power of Words” does have political implications, implications that are clearly evident if only we trace the story to its likely source. Although this kind of detection may seem unsuited to an angelic dialogue, “The Power of Words” itself betrays some formal affiliations with the tale of ratiocination.

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Both Dupin and Agathos know the way to Orion, both revere the power of mathematical analysis, and both are adept at fathoming soul from matter. Like Dupin, Agathos solves a mystery while under the admiring gaze of a less gifted confidant, and like Dupin, Agathos deciphers the material surface of his universe in order to explain a crime—if only a crime of the heart. Finally—and this is what has passed unnoticed—“The Power of Words” is in all likelihood a purloined text derived from a treatise by Charles Babbage. If this is the case, Poe chose an excellent source from which to borrow, for Charles Babbage was one of the pre-eminent polymaths of the nineteenth century. In his lifetime, Babbage was esteemed for his accomplishments as a mathematician, scientist, inventor, and political economist. For twelve years he held the prestigious Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University (a post once filled by Isaac Newton), and in 1832 he published a pathbreaking and enormously influential study of industrial capitalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures. (In his research for Capital, Karl Marx copied down seventy-three excerpts from this text.) Today Babbage is most often remembered as the designer of early computing machines called the “Difference Engine” and later the “Analytical Engines.” According to Anthony Hyman, these “unique precursors of the modern computer, almost forgotten and then rediscovered in the middle of the twentieth century . . . are one of the great intellectual achievements in the history of mankind.”8 Babbage also took an interest in fields ranging from politics to authorial rights to religion; his interest in the latter subject culminated in a theory of natural religion published as The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. The title refers to Francis Henry Egerton, Earl of Bridgewater, who upon his death in 1829 left a bequest of £8000 to support research “On the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation.”9 Administered by the Royal Society, the bequest was used to commission eight treatises by eight writers from various fields. Babbage was not included in this original group, but he nevertheless considered his work to be consistent with the general mission of the Bridgewater series. First published in 1837, eight years before “The Power of Words,” Babbage’s Ninth Bridgewater Treatise strives to reconcile the competing claims of science and religion. According to Babbage, knowledge of the Deity is best attained, not from revelation or metaphysical argument, but from scientific examination of the material universe that the Deity created. Like most proponents of natural religion, Babbage believed that the Deity created only in the beginning and did not need to intervene thereafter in earthly affairs. The challenge, as Babbage saw it, was to account for the apparent deviations from natural law, ranging from the emergence of new species to those extreme deviations called miracles. (The debate over the origin of species obviously preceded Darwin.) Babbage’s unique contribution to the controversy derived from his work on the Difference Engine. In Babbage’s view, the apparent deviations from natural law are like partial equa-


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tions or formulae within a larger program that has been running since the beginning of time. The God who set the universe in motion is therefore the ultimate programmer, and a miracle, in Anthony Hyman’s gloss, is “merely a subroutine called down from the Heavenly store” (Charles Babbage, 139). The most interesting part of Babbage’s wide-ranging argument comes in the middle of the treatise, in a chapter entitled “On the permanent Impression of our Words and Actions on the globe we inhabit.” This, I contend, is the likely source for Poe’s “The Power of Words.” To make the case for this claim, I shall commence by establishing Poe’s motive and opportunity, and then demonstrate the similarity between the two texts. Poe’s interest in the Bridgewater series started in February 1836, when he reviewed Mark Peter Roget’s Animal and Vegetable Physiology, Considered with Reference to Natural Theology for the Southern Literary Messenger. Poe begins the review with a curious assertion: “As we have no doubt that the great majority of our readers are acquainted with the circumstances attending the publication of the Bridgewater Treatises, we shall content ourselves with a very brief statement of those circumstances, by way of introduction to some few observations respecting this, the fifth of the Series.”10 It is not clear that Poe himself, let alone his audience, was truly familiar with the series. The bulk of the review, moreover, is devoted to the “circumstances attending the publication” of the treatises, leaving only two very cursory paragraphs at the end for the book itself. Poe spends most of the review discussing the administration of the bequest, the problems incurred by dividing it among eight writers, and the advantages of putting such a project under the control of a single intelligence. Poe, in other words, seems less interested in the “Almighty design” of the universe than in the lucrative design of Bridgewater’s £8000 bequest. This large sum of money evidently inspired him to imagine an alternative economic reality, one in which a single writer would receive the entire bequest to compose a unified and comprehensive treatise: “the bequest of the eight thousand pounds, which en masse, is magnificent, and which might have operated as a sufficient inducement for some one competent person to devote a sufficiency of time to the steady and gradual completion of a noble and extraordinary work—this bequest, we say, is somewhat of a common-place affair when we regard it in its subdivision” (Complete Works, 8:208). Poe’s next mention of the Bridgewater series came in his 1844 “Marginalia,” where he argues that “the universe is a plot of God” (ER, 1315). This passage, discussed at greater length below, reappears in “The American Drama” (in 1845) and Eureka (in 1848). Babbage’s Ninth Bridgewater Treatise was first published in 1837, and a revised, second edition appeared in 1838. More importantly, an American edition was published in 1841 by the Philadelphia firm of Lea & Blanchard. It is therefore possible that Poe stumbled upon The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise during or before 1844, especially since his correspondence for this year reveals an increasing fascination with the kind of materialism propounded by Babbage.11

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It should be noted, however, that Poe had an interest in Babbage quite apart from the Bridgewater series. In Poe’s 1836 article on “Maelzel’s Chess Player,” Babbage’s Difference Engine figures as the standard by which to measure all future automata: But if these machines were ingenious what shall we think of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage? What shall we think of an engine of wood and metal which can not only compute astronomical and navigation tables to any given extent, but render the exactitude of its operations mathematically certain through its power of correcting its possible errors? What shall we think of a Machine which can not only accomplish all this, but actually print off its elaborate results, when obtained, without the slightest intervention of the intellect of man? (ER, 1255)

In addition, the ill-fated heroine of “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” describes “Babbage’s Calculating Machine” as one of the wonders of the world: “Another of these magi constructed a creature that put to shame even the genius of him who made it; for so great were its reasoning powers that, in a second, it performed calculations of so vast an extent that they would have required the united labor of fifty thousand fleshy men for a year” (PT, 801). Throughout these references, Poe reveals his solicitude about the fate of intellectuals in the emerging industrial economy: the Bridgewater bequest raises objections to the division of intellectual labor, while Babbage’s Difference Engine is depicted as a “creature” which puts mere humans to shame. These concerns are thoroughly consistent with Poe’s other writings, which often present the machine as a figure for the degradation of writing in the nineteenth century.12 Poe therefore had both motive and opportunity to take notice of The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. He was not, of course, the only writer intrigued by Babbage. Charles Dickens, for example, fondly discussed Babbage’s theory of verbal “impression” years after its original publication.13 And although the treatise may have baffled readers when it appeared, it nevertheless received some favorable attention in the American press. A reviewer for the Corsair was driven to delirious speculation: Mr. Babbage in his (miscalled Bridgewater) Treatise announces the astounding fact, as a very sublime truth, that every word uttered from the creation of the world has registered itself, and is still speaking, and will speak for ever in vibration. In fact, there is a great album of Babel. But what too, if the great business of the sun be to act as registrar likewise, and to give out impressions of our looks, and pictures of our actions; and so, if with Bishop Berkeley’s theory, there be no such thing as any thing, quoad [sic] matter, for aught we know to the contrary, other worlds of the system may be peopled and conducted with the images of persons and transactions thrown off from this and from each other; the whole universal nature being nothing more than phonetic and photogenic structures.14


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Poe may have seen such an account in a contemporary periodical, but extensive similarities suggest that he possessed first-hand knowledge of “The Permanent Impression of Our Words” when he composed “The Power of Words” in 1845. As I shall demonstrate, the texts by Poe and Babbage share five basic claims: 1) The Deity created only at the inception of the universe; 2) Spoken words produce physical impulses that leave permanent impressions on matter; 3) These impressions are distinct and predictable; 4) A superior being, gifted in mathematical analysis but without divine omniscience, could predict the full effect of the impulses through time; 5) By extension, a superior being in the future could deduce from the arrangement of matter the originating impulses, including those impulses derived from human speech. The first similarity, concerning a Deity who merely set the universe in motion, is of course standard fare for natural religion. Many advocates of natural religion compared the universe to a timepiece; if one were to stumble upon a pocket watch on the seashore, they reasoned, one would infer from the design of the watch something about the complexity and sophistication of its creator. Babbage, as suggested above, compares the universe to the Difference Engine rather than a watch, but his basic contentions are the same. At the beginning of his treatise, he distinguishes between “a system in which the restoring hand of its contriver is applied, either frequently or at distant intervals, and one which had received at its first formation the impress of the will of its author, foreseeing the varied but yet necessary laws of its action throughout the whole of its existence.”15 At first glance, such views do not seem congenial to Poe, who insisted upon the “literal fulfilment” of Biblical prophecy in his 1837 review of John L. Stephens (ER, 929). Nevertheless, in “The Power of Words” Agathos flatly claims that “the Deity does not create,” by which he means that the Deity does not apply a “restoring hand” to the universe: In the beginning only, he created. The seeming creatures which are now, throughout the universe, so perpetually springing into being, can only be considered as the mediate or indirect, not as the direct or immediate results of the Divine creative power. (PT, 823)

Both Poe and Babbage discuss the emergence of new life forms, and significantly, both deny that these life forms are the direct result of divine intervention. In addition, both Poe and Babbage make claims about “natural laws” and “appearances” to advocate the same position.16 “The Power of Words” therefore includes not only the general tenets of natural religion, but the specific terms and arguments of Babbage’s treatise. The second similarity is much more telling. As mentioned above, both texts are centered upon a very unusual claim about the material effect of speech. In Babbage’s treatise, this claim is offered at the outset, as if it were a scientific hypothesis in need of demonstration; in Poe’s dialogue the claim is withheld until the end, as if to give it greater dramatic effect. But both texts make the

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same argument. In “The Permanent Impression of our Words,” Babbage first describes the conservation of force (the equality of action and reaction) and then offers his theory as an extension of this principle: The pulsations of the air, once set in motion by the human voice, cease not to exist with the sounds to which they give rise. (108)

In “The Power of Words,” Agathos formulates the argument as a question: And while I thus spoke, did there not cross your mind some thought of the physical power of words? Is not every word an impulse on the air? (PT, 825)

Both texts also assert that such impulses permanently affect every atom in existence. According to Babbage, a spoken word quickly impresses itself upon the earth’s entire atmosphere: The waves of air thus raised, perambulate the earth and ocean’s surface, and in less than twenty hours every atom of its atmosphere takes up the altered movement due to that infinitesimal portion of the primitive motion which has been conveyed to it through countless channels, and which must continue to influence its path throughout its future existence. (109)

In “The Power of Words,” Agathos describes vibrations caused by hand motions rather than speech (since this claim is reserved for the end), but the argument is essentially the same: We moved our hands, for example, when we were dwellers on the earth, and, in so doing, gave vibration to the atmosphere which engirdled it. This vibration was indefinitely extended, till it gave impulse to every particle of the earth’s air, which thenceforward, and for ever, was actuated by the one movement of the hand. (PT, 823)

Agathos does not mention Babbage’s estimate of a twenty-hour time period, but he does say that it would be “easy to determine in what precise period an impulse of a given extent would engirdle the orb, and impress (for ever) every atom of the atmosphere circumambient” (PT, 824). Neither Babbage nor Poe rests content with noting a permanent and universal impact on matter. Instead, both go on to claim that the vibrations caused by humans have distinct and predictable consequences. This enables both Poe and Babbage to imagine a kind of investigating angel, midway between man and god, who would use mathematical analysis to “read” the material universe: [Babbage:] If man enjoyed a larger command over mathematical analysis, his knowledge of these motions would be more extensive; but a being possessed of unbounded knowledge of that science, could trace [even] the minutest conse-

[Poe:] [T]o a being of infinite understanding—one to whom the perfection of the algebraic analysis lay unfolded— there could be no difficulty in tracing every impulse given the air—and the ether through the air—to the remotest


quence of that primary impulse. Such a being, however far exalted above our race, would still be immeasurably below even our conception of infinite intelligence. But supposing the original conditions of each atom of the earth’s atmosphere, as well as all the extraneous causes acting on it to be given, and supposing also the interference of no new causes, such a being would be able clearly to trace its future but inevitable path, and he would distinctly foresee and might absolutely predict for any, even the remotest period of time, the circumstances and future history of every particle of that atmosphere. (110– 11)

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consequences at any even infinitely remote epoch of time . . . . And not only could such a being do this, but at any epoch, should a given result be afforded him—should one of these numberless comets, for example, be presented to his inspection—he could have no difficulty in determining, by the analytic retrogradation, to what original impulse it was due. This power of retrogradation in its absolute fulness and perfection—this faculty of referring at all epochs, all effects to all causes—is of course the prerogative of the Deity alone—but in every variety of degree, short of the absolute perfection, is the power itself exercised by the whole host of the Angelic intelligences. (PT, 824–25)

In Babbage’s account, “a being possessed of unbounded knowledge” of “mathematical analysis” “could trace the minutest consequence” of an aerial “impulse” to “even the remotest period of time.” In Poe’s account, “a being of infinite understanding . . . of algebraic analysis” has “no difficulty in tracing every impulse given the air . . . to the remotest consequences at any even infinitely remote epoch of time.” In both accounts, moreover, the agent of detection is a calculating angel who ranks between man and God. The foregoing similarities demonstrate the likelihood that Poe borrowed from Babbage, but there is yet another similarity which indicates his motive. By claiming that the aerial impulses of human speech leave unique and predictable impressions on matter, both Poe and Babbage lay the groundwork for their primary contention that material impressions can be traced backward to originating impulses. For both Poe and Babbage, in other words, the universe is a vast material archive that contains a permanent record of all that has been said and done since the beginning of time. Babbage’s description is especially striking: Thus considered, what a strange chaos is the wide atmosphere we breathe! Every atom, impressed with good and ill, retains at once the motions which philosophers and sages have imparted to it, mixed and combined in ten thousand ways with all that is worthless and base. The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered. There, in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest, as well as with the latest sighs of mortality, stand for ever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of each particle, the testimony of man’s changeful will. (111–12)

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Poe, it should be recalled, had demonstrated a fascination with a readable universe long before he wrote “The Power of Words.” Starting with his earliest critical writings, Poe celebrated the truth of surfaces (PT, 13), and in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, he also experimented with what I have called “earth-writing.” In addition, Poe’s intellectuals are able to decipher the significance of material phenomena that other observers find baffling. In “The GoldBug,” as we have seen, Legrand traces the figures on an old piece of parchment back to Captain Kidd’s buried treasure, and in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Dupin, like the investigating angel, uses his “peculiar analytic ability” to reconstruct the crime from physical details that appear meaningless to the police (PT, 401). Given these predispositions, Poe must have felt a shock of recognition when he stumbled upon Babbage’s treatise, particularly the passage quoted above. It is therefore no surprise that in “The Power of Words,” the universe functions as a kind of text which angels can read through the use of “analytic retrogradation.” Poe, however, is not satisfied with a simple description of this universe, and he proceeds to illustrate the theory with a planet covered by beautiful flowers and sublimely terrifying volcanoes, a planet ultimately derived from a passionate utterance made by Agathos some three centuries before. This, it seems to me, is an implausible illustration of an improbable theory, but as we shall see, the very multiplication of improbability serves to reveal some crucial differences between Poe’s tale and Babbage’s treatise, which may now be identified as the originating impulse. For one thing, “The Power of Words” entirely omits Babbage’s primary point about moral responsibility. Midway through “The Permanent Impression of our Words,” Babbage extends his theory from human speech to human action: “But if the air we breathe is the never-failing historian of the sentiments we have uttered, earth, air and ocean, are the eternal witnesses of the acts we have done” (112). To be sure, Babbage’s universe sometimes looks like a vast paranoid fantasy where every action is seen and recorded by molecular spies. But as demonstrated near the end of the chapter, Babbage clearly wants to emphasize the consequences of immoral or criminal acts, both to the universe and to the culprits themselves: If the Almighty stamped on the brow of the earliest murderer—the indelible and visible mark of his guilt,—he has also established laws by which every succeeding criminal is not less irrevocably chained to the testimony of his crime; for every atom of his mortal frame . . . will still retain . . . some movement derived from that very muscular effort, by which the crime itself was perpetrated. (115–16)

Babbage’s universe would therefore seem to correspond perfectly with Dupin’s Paris, but as Alan Tate has observed, in “The Power of Words” Poe ignores “the moral responsibility, the check upon human power.” The sublime and beautiful star at the end of the dialogue derives from the violent utterances of a bereaved (or rejected) lover. According to Agathos, “Its brilliant flowers are the


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dearest of all unfulfilled dreams, and its raging volcanoes are the passions of the most turbulent and unhallowed of hearts” (PT, 825). Just as Poe re-literalizes the symbol of the trowel in “The Cask of Amontillado,” he in this tale re-materializes symbols that are central to romanticism, if not to the entire poetic tradition. One might say that he re-materializes these symbols with a vengeance, for at no time does Poe trouble his brave new universe with the strictures of human morality or the pangs of human guilt. Departing markedly from his 1837 review of Stephens, Poe here imagines the “literal fulfilment,” not of prophecy, but of spoken passion. This is of course consonant with Poe’s defense of art for art’s sake, as well as with his Coleridgean claim that poetry should aim at pleasure rather than truth (ER, 11). But Poe did not merely seek to free literary discourse from moralism; he often seemed bent on purging literature of all social and political issues that could be characterized as partisan. As demonstrated in Chapter Five, the partisan issue that Poe sidestepped most conspicuously was the struggle over slavery. It is therefore highly significant that Babbage’s treatise culminates in a vigorous attack on slavery and the traffic in slaves. It is even more significant that Poe omits this part of his source altogether. From what has been cited already, it is clear that Babbage wanted to emphasize the moral consequences of his theory of matter. First he discusses the physical impressions created by spoken words; next he describes the more extensive impressions made by actions; and then he warns of the even greater impressions left by immoral or criminal acts, which God—the ultimate detective—cannot fail to discern. But for Babbage, slavery is the greatest crime of all, and he therefore concludes with a commentary on one of the most notorious outrages of the trans-Atlantic slave trade: The soul of the negro, whose fettered body surviving the living charnel-house of his infected prison, was thrown into the sea to lighten the ship, that his christian master might escape the limited justice at length assigned by civilized man to crimes whose profit had long gilded their atrocity,—will need, at the last great day of human account, no living witness of his earthly agony. When man and all his race shall have disappeared from the face of our planet, ask every particle of air still floating over the unpeopled earth, and it will record the cruel mandate of the tyrant. Interrogate every wave which breaks unimpeded on ten thousand desolate shores, and it will give evidence of the last gurgle of the waters which closed over the head of his dying victim: confront the murderer with every corporeal atom of his immolated slave, and in its still quivering movements he will read the prophet’s denunciation of the prophet king. “And Nathan said unto David—Thou art the man.” (117–19)

Although “Thou Art the Man” is, perhaps by coincidence, the title of one of Poe’s minor murders, he clearly refused the political as well as the moral consequences of Babbage’s argument. Given Poe’s acknowledged status as a

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Southerner, it would have been difficult for him to take the high road on slavery, regardless of other constraints. The omission of slavery, however, accords not only with Poe’s longstanding aversion to partisan political issues, but also with his longstanding endeavor to define the domain of literary discourse in such a way as to produce a literary commodity capable of crossing the boundaries of taste and region. Revealing as much by what he refuses as by what he borrows, Poe once again demonstrates that his political concerns were largely confined to the political economy of literature. The rift which starts with morality and politics therefore culminates in a fundamental difference over production. What matters here is not that Poe and Babbage disagree over capitalism, but that Poe uses Babbage’s theory to imagine an alternative universe of poetic creation. Such a universe had long haunted Poe’s dreams. In his second angelic dialogue, for example, Poe bemoans a world scarred by industrial development and longs for a return to natural beauty. Entitled “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” the dialogue describes a world ravaged by an excess of technology and a deficiency of taste: . . . huge smoking cities arose, innumerable. Green leaves shrank before the hot breath of cities. The fair face of Nature was deformed as with the ravages of some loathsome disease. (PT, 451)

At this time, Poe could envision no other solution than purification by fire, but his new world nevertheless retains a place for material beings: Now it was that, in twilight, we discoursed of the days to come, when the Art-scarred surface of the Earth, having undergone that purification which alone could efface its rectangular obscenities, should clothe itself anew in the verdure and the mountainslopes and the smiling waters of Paradise, and be rendered at length a fit dwellingplace for man. . . for the redeemed, regenerated, blissful, and now immortal, but still for the material, man. (PT, 453)

At the same time that he was nursing fantasies of a material world unscarred by technology or industrial capitalism, Poe was also dreaming of new kinds of signification or poetic creation that were unmediated by capital and unfettered by existing conditions of production. The earth-writing in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, for example, may be seen as an attempt to resist “the degrading spirit of utilitarianism, which sees in mountains and waterfalls only quarries and manufacturing sites.”17 Poe’s magazine project offered a different path to creative freedom, for it would have allowed him to avoid “the medium of a publisher’s will” (ER, 1024). And in 1845, the same year that he published “The Power of Words,” Poe hoped that a limited degree of creative freedom could be achieved through a publishing technology called anastatic printing. As explained in Chapter Two, Poe believed that cheaper printing methods could liberate writers from “the expensive interference of the typesetter, and the often ruinous intervention of the publisher.” In many ways, “Anastatic


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Printing” serves as a kind of companion piece to “The Power of Words,” for it contains a political defense of a “new régime” in which poordevil authors “speak as often and as freely as the most exalted.”18 But nothing approaches the grandiose vision of “The Power of Words,” which elevates writing to new heights of potency and productivity. This emphasis on the productivity of language marks the starkest contrast between Poe’s view of a poetic cosmos and Babbage’s theory of a programmed universe. In “The Permanent Impression of Our Words,” Babbage starts with the relatively modest traces left by words and then discusses the greater impact of human actions, all in order to heighten our sense of moral responsibility. Poe, on the other hand, starts by discussing human actions and concludes with an exalted account of words that summon whole worlds into existence, all in order to dramatize the sublime power of unmediated poetic utterance. Almost by necessity, these different universes are ruled by different gods. Babbage, perhaps guilty of projecting his own attributes onto the Deity, envisions the Creator as the perfect programmer of the perfect computer. Poe, guilty of the same sin, imagines God as the perfect author of the perfect plot. This is vaguely implied by the tale itself, but in his “Marginalia,” Poe provides more evidence about his narrator-God and his debt to Babbage’s Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. The entry, appearing in the November 1844 Democratic Review, begins by criticizing the account of biological adaptation in the Bridgewater treatises: All the Bridgewater treatises have failed in noticing the great idiosyncrasy in the Divine system of adaptation:—that idiosyncrasy which stamps the adaptation as Divine, in distinction from that which is the work of merely human constructiveness. I speak of the complete mutuality of adaptation.

There are several curiosities in this and the remainder of the passage. First, Poe had not referred to a Bridgewater treatise for more than eight years, and yet he here speaks authoritatively of the entire series. His confidence to speak with authority about the eight official treatises, I suggest, derives from his perusal of Babbage’s unofficial ninth treatise. Second, Poe describes the reciprocity of adaptation as an original discovery, but in The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, Babbage makes a very similar point about how changes in both species and the environment are governed by “one comprehensive law” (46). Third and most importantly, Poe develops the idea of mutual adaptation into a theory of narrative and narrative’s God: The Bridgewater tractists may have avoided this point, on account of its apparent tendency to overthrow the idea of cause in general—consequently of a First Cause— of God. But it is more probable that they have failed to perceive what no one preceding them, has, to my knowledge, perceived. The pleasure which we derive from any exertion of human ingenuity, is in the

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direct ratio of the approach to this species of reciprocity between cause and effect. In the construction of plot, for example, in fictitious literature, we should aim at so arranging the points, or incidents, that we cannot distinctly see, in respect to any one of them, whether that one depends from any one other, or upholds it. In this sense, of course, perfection of plot is unattainable in fact,—because Man is the constructor. The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a Plot of God. (ER, 1316)

Unless these remarks are traced to Babbage, they appear to have come from nowhere, springing up eight years after Poe reviewed a Bridgewater treatise for the Messenger, and advocating what would be for Poe a totally new argument about the design of the universe. At the very least, Babbage’s treatise dispels some of the mystery surrounding “The Power of Words.” It may even dispel some of the mystery surrounding Poe, chiefly by revealing the hitherto undiscovered links between the fantasy of material creation and the reality of his material predicament. This link, though implied in “The Power of Words,” is most clearly illustrated by another tale from the 1840s, one that centers on the landscape creations of Poe’s happiest and richest character. The tale, first published as “The Landscape Garden” and then revised in 1846 as “The Domain of Arnheim,” recounts the charmed life of the narrator’s friend Ellison. According to the narrator, Ellison’s happiness derived from four elementary conditions: outdoor exercise, love, contempt of ambition, and an object of unceasing pursuit. Ellison, however, is greatly assisted in the fulfillment of all these conditions when he inherits, on his twenty-first birthday, a fortune of four hundred and fifty million dollars. Poe, characteristically linking fantasy and calculation, includes an extended discussion of the simple interest that such a sum would generate. He even breaks the interest down into the amount accrued every year, and every month, and every day, and every hour, concluding at length with the sum that Ellison would earn during every minute of his existence. These figures serve only to confound Ellison’s friends, and the narrator remarks at the end of his calculations that “Men knew not what to imagine” (PT, 857). Ellison, of course, does know what to imagine, and in “The Domain of Arnheim,” knowing what to imagine means knowing what to buy. Significantly, Ellison’s expenditures harmonize perfectly with the ideas developed in “The Power of Words.” For one thing, Ellison aspires to express his “poetic sentiment” through material creation: In the widest and noblest sense he was a poet . . . . Some peculiarities, either in his early education, or in the nature of his intellect, had tinged with what is termed materialism all his ethical speculations; and it was this bias, perhaps, which led him to believe that the most advantageous at least, if not the sole legitimate field for the poetic exercise, lies in the creation of novel moods of purely physical loveliness. (PT, 858)


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This tends to substantiate Tate’s claims about the amorality of Poe’s vision, which could also be seen (mutatis mutandis) as Poe’s indifference to political and social movements in antebellum America. In his critical writings, Poe was of course fairly explicit in his calls for a literature untainted by political allusions or by “the heresy of The Didactic” (ER, 75), but in neither “The Domain of Arnheim” nor in “The Power of Words” does Poe argue that art should be separate from morality. Instead, he imagines a poet who would be morally dedicated to material beauty and material beauty alone. “The Domain of Arnheim” accordingly identifies landscape gardening as “the fairest field for the display of imagination in the endless combining of forms of novel beauty” (PT, 859). This language resembles Poe’s description of the tale as an art form that constitutes “the fairest field for the exercise of the loftiest talent” (ER, 571). The claim about novelty, moreover, closely parallels the position of Agathos in “The Power of Words,” where the angel equates the “modification of old forms” with the “creation of new” (PT, 824). In any event, Ellison spares no expense in obtaining the perfect tract of land and in creating the perfect landscape. Justifying his efforts, Ellison makes several references to angels, references that once again accord with “The Power of Words.” According to Ellison, the beauty of the earth can only be appreciated from a point of view “distant from the earth’s surface, although not beyond the limits of its atmosphere.” From this, Ellison infers the existence of “earth-angels . . . for whose death-refined appreciation of the beautiful, may have been set in array by God the wide landscape-gardens of the hemisphere” (PT, 861). At this point Ellison merely contemplates how angels would view or “read” the earth’s surface; later he goes one step further by considering the designs that such superior beings could produce. Ellison’s remarkable conclusion is that a landscape poet with enough money could rival the creative power of the angels: A poet, having very unusual pecuniary resources, might . . . so imbue his designs at once with extent and novelty of beauty, as to convey the sentiment of spiritual interference . . . let us imagine, for example, a landscape whose combined vastness and definitiveness—whose united beauty, magnificence and strangeness shall convey the idea of care, or culture, or superintendence, on the part of beings superior, yet akin to humanity—then the sentiment of interest is preserved, while the art intervolved is made to assume the air of an intermediate or secondary nature—a nature which is not God, nor an emanation from God, but which still is nature in the sense of the handiwork of the angels that hover between man and God. (PT, 863–64)

This is very close to the vision of “The Power of Words,” but the difference is worth noting. In “The Domain of Arnheim,” the world is still regulated by the laws of political economy, and Ellison can realize his poetic sentiment only by virtue of his enormous wealth. As suggested by Kent Ljungquist and Liliane Weissberg, moreover, the final vision of the tale falls short of its initial promise.19 Curiously, it was the theory of Charles Babbage, one of the pre-eminent

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political economists of the age, that enabled Poe to think beyond the “horrid laws of political economy” and to construct a scientific fantasy of unmediated material creation. Even more curiously, the escape from capitalist regulation enabled not only sublimity and beauty, but also a kind of excessive or hyperproductivity. Ellison, after all, needs many years and millions of dollars to fashion his plot of land, whereas Agathos needs just a few free seconds to speak whole worlds into existence. It is as if Poe were recalling Jeremiah Reynolds’s boast that “our national industry will constantly go on, destroying and recombining the elements of productiveness, till every atom is made to bear its greatest amount of value,” only in Poe’s vision every atom is made to bear the greatest amount of poetic sentiment. Ultimately, then, the link to Babbage supports a new account of both a tale and its writer. In the old literary history, “The Power of Words” sprung fully formed into existence, propounding a singular theory of material creation. And in the romantic interpretations of Poe himself, an artist created texts which, like the worlds of Agathos, seemed to exist out of space, out of time. In place of the old mysteries, there emerges a wondrous tale of adaptation. As already noted, Poe encountered his first Bridgewater treatise in 1836. Instead of explicating its theological significance, Poe speculated about what might have transpired if the “magnificent” £8000 bequest had been awarded to “one competent person,” who could have devoted “a sufficiency of time” to the composition of a single treatise. During or before 1844, Poe stumbled upon Babbage’s Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, which had recently been republished in the United States. Struck by the scope of the treatise, Poe adapted a theology modeled on the Difference Engine to serve his own views and his own struggles with a capitalist publishing industry. The first traces of Babbage’s treatise appear in an entry for the November 1844 “Marginalia.” This entry, which contains a discussion of narrative unity, has been called “the matrix of Poe’s critical and metaphysical theories.”20 Then, in 1845, Poe borrowed nearly every major argument from Babbage’s “On the Permanent Impression of Our Words” for “The Power of Words.” Aside from being the best of his angelic dialogues, “The Power of Words” has been acclaimed as Poe’s most sublime romantic fantasy. By 1848, however, when Poe was running out of a “sufficiency of time,” he shifted from an optimistic fantasy of material creation to Eureka’s dark prophecy of absolute material destruction. The natural theology of The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, in other words, ultimately culminated in the grandiose yet strangely fatalistic vision of Eureka, which may fairly be called the tenth Bridgewater treatise. Space and prudence prevent me from saying a great deal about Eureka, but some points may be noted in passing. For one thing, passages from the “Marginalia” and “The Power of Words” reappear in Eureka, often with subtle revisions that suggest Poe’s desire to refine his cosmology.21 In addition, Eureka is


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in many ways the fulfillment of Poe’s experimentation with “the verisimilar style” in travel narratives, scientific hoaxes, and tales of ratiocination. At one point in Eureka, Poe even paraphrases and footnotes a comment made by Dupin in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” thereby transferring the ratiocinative method from criminology to natural religion (PT, 1293). To some extent, this merely demonstrates the similarity between Eureka and the Bridgewater treatises, for all of these texts borrow from a multitude of scientific discourses to construct arguments about nature’s God. Despite such similarities, however, Eureka remains a singular work, the product not only of Poe’s eclectic reading, but also of his hard experiences in the publishing industry. As suggested in previous chapters, the publishing industry immured the commercial writer between capital and the literate masses, and this forced Poe to devise numerous economic strategies to defend his artistic individuality, if not his unique artistic soul. Only with Eureka does Poe cease his struggle for independent, unmediated material signification, primarily because he has devised a material theology to naturalize the collapse of individual identity into a “general consciousness.” Poe refers to this apocalyptic moment as “the final ingathering” when the “myriads of individual Intelligences become blended— when the bright stars become blended—into One” (PT, 1350, 1358). This entails the total annihilation of “our individual identity,” but as Poe argues at the end of Eureka, the sacrifice of self is necessary for each intelligence to “become God.”22 In the midst of this apocalyptic delirium, Poe seems to have forsaken “The Power of Words” and the original dream of an unmediated, material language. Perhaps this is because the material apocalypse of Eureka functions not as a fulfillment of Poe’s dream, but as a compensation for all of his failed attempts to achieve real creative freedom. In this regard, Marx’s comments on religion are especially relevant: Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.23

At the close of this passage religion appears as a kind of indifference engine, but more pertinent is Marx’s earlier reference to the “sigh of the oppressed creature.” From what has been suggested so far, it is clear that the sigh of Eureka has a history far different from the one conventionally imagined, a history linked, through Charles Babbage, to both the twilight of natural religion and the dawn of the computer age. But it is Poe’s special predicament as a commercial writer which lends coherence to the grand trajectory of his material imagination. This trajectory stretches from the earth-writing of Pym to the “final ingathering” of Eureka, reaching a kind of sanguine peak in the mid-1840s. “The Power of Words” and “The Domain of Arnheim” contain

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Poe’s most extreme illustrations of unfettered material signification, and obviously such illustrations would have appealed strongly to a writer who longed to escape the mediation of capital. In the previous chapter, I suggested that there was a latent utopian impulse behind the culture of surfaces: instead of simply resolving the structural antagonism between capital and labor, the culture of surfaces portends a signifying environment where the economic is abolished altogether and where writers are free to flout the will of the Capital Reader. “The Power of Words” projects this impulse outward to every atom in existence. In Poe’s fabulous cosmos, a veritable universe of surfaces, all matter is at the command of even penniless human poets, and all poems are admired by an audience of angels. With a single materialist fantasy, “The Power of Words” thereby escapes both the economic constraints of the publishing industry and the degrading taste of the literate masses. There are, however, at least two fatal complications to this fantasy. One complication involves the unacknowledged source of the tale. Poe has often been treated as the ghost in the machine of modern rationalism, but there has always been an opposing tendency in his work, a tendency best illustrated by the analytical temper of “The Philosophy of Composition,” the scientific hoaxes, and the tales of ratiocination. “The Power of Words” may now be added to this list. Long viewed as Poe’s most romantic myth, the tale actually originates in the work of Charles Babbage, a mathematician and economist who also designed automatons and calculating engines. In this sense “The Power of Words” may be taken as yet another sign of Poe’s persistent fascination, not with the ghost in the machine, but with the machine inside the ghost. From this there follows a second complication, one arising from Poe’s insistence on unmediated material creation. The problem becomes apparent if we shift our attention from the last word of the title to the first, namely to the theory of power propounded by the tale. Even spiritually considered, the tale seems strangely limited, functioning less as an opiate of the masses than as a rationalist fantasy of the commercial writer. And judging by the trajectory of Poe’s career, the fantasy led quite literally to nowhere, that is, to the material apocalypse prophesied at the end of Eureka. So despite Poe’s dream of a material language unfettered by economic constraints, he could make no earthly headway against the capitalist publishing industry. And despite his desire to write for “the whole host of Angelic Intelligences,” he could bring no text into material existence without first satisfying the Capital Reader. As Poe at length came to realize, fables of power are not in themselves empowering. The passage from autonomy to assimilation is strangely prefigured in Poe’s 1835 tale “Shadow—A Parable.” This is the only other tale with a character named “Oinos,” although here he appears as a human narrator (on the verge of death) rather than an angelic interlocutor. The Oinos of “Shadow” writes for the future, anticipating that his words, “graven with a stylus of iron,” will


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enjoy a permanence that mortals lack. Oinos explains that a company of seven have locked themselves away in a chamber of a magnificent hall, vainly hoping to escape “the black wings of Pestilence” (PT, 218). Death, however, has already taken young Zoilus, whose enshrouded corpse serves as a reminder of their fate. The surviving companions try to console themselves with song and drink, but soon they see a shadow hovering near the body of Zoilus. Oinos works up the nerve to question the shadow, who claims to have come from the regions of the dead. The men are alarmed by this reply, but what really terrifies them is the sound of the shadow’s voice: And then did we, the seven, start from our seats in horror, and stand trembling, and shuddering, and aghast: for the tones in the voice of the shadow were not the tones of any one being, but of a multitude of beings, and, varying in their cadences from syllable to syllable, fell duskily upon our ears in the well remembered and familiar accents of many thousand departed friends. (PT, 220)

For our present purposes there are two points worth noting. The first has to do with the destiny of Zoilus, who is on the verge of being borne away by the shadow. There are several speculations as to the source of the name, ranging from Zoe (life) to Coilus (a sacred or heavenly person). “Zoilus,” however, is also the name of the critic who enumerated the faults of Homer and Apollo. Not surprisingly, Poe himself was called the “Zoilus of the Messenger” for his harsh reviews of popular literature, and in later years he proudly accepted this appellation and defended his critical approach (ER, 507, 1061). But regardless of whether Poe identified himself with Zoilus in 1835 or only retrospectively, the impending action of the tale is clear: Zoilus—“the genius and demon of the scene”—will be carried away from the chamber of the privileged seven to the teeming region of the dead, where his utterances will be merged with others into an ominous, ghostly voice. What are we to make of this ghostly voice? In Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing, J. Gerald Kennedy has shown how “Shadow” ambiguously allegorizes “the presence of death in the midst of life.” At the end of the tale, according to Kennedy, writing is ironically suppressed by the speaking of death, and this in turn raises an intriguing proposition: “if the dead could actually speak for themselves as they do in this fantasy, writing would have no function.”24 In the context of Poe’s material predicament, this proposition takes on distinctly social implications, for what makes death so threatening to writing is the fact that it speaks with a collective voice. As we have seen, the emergence of a collective being, or the transition from the few to the many, is a recurrent theme in Poe’s most speculative writing. In Eureka, for example, the transition from the scattered few to the assembled multitude is described as both a gravitational and spiritual inevitability. But Poe sometimes viewed the transition as a kind of economic destiny as well. Early in his career, Poe argued that circulation would displace taste as a measure of literary value, and in his plans for

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“Tales of the Folio Club,” Poe envisioned a disgruntled author who would demur from the judgment of the Club and appeal directly to the public. Even the poet gravitates toward the multitude, for as we have seen, “The Philosophy of Composition” acknowledges that a poem must satisfy both “the popular and the critical taste” in order to attain material existence in the literary marketplace (ER, 15). In Poe’s world the commercial writer, like Zoilus the critic, inclines inevitably toward the masses. The only question seems to be whether it is possible to maintain a certain individuality in the midst of the multitude. Not surprisingly, Poe developed a number of material strategies for resisting or dialectically transcending the tendency toward assimilation. The narrator of “Shadow” preserves his story with “a stylus of iron” (PT, 218), and Poe later sought to preserve his “individuality” with a magazine called “The Stylus.” According to the prospectus, Poe’s lack of a proprietary stake in the Southern Literary Messenger and Graham’s made it impossible for him “to stamp, upon their internal character, that individuality which he believes essential to the full success of all similar publications” (ER, 1034). Poe goes on to claim that this individuality can be attained “only where a single mind has at least the general direction of the enterprise.”25 But Poe’s schemes for material permanence—of the self and of the word—are always counterbalanced by powerful images of dissolution. The beautiful planet of Agathos will be obliterated in the final unity of matter, just as the polymath Roderick Usher is destroyed in the wreck of his ancestral home. Quite appropriately, as the House of Usher collapses into the tarn, the narrator hears “a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters,” which resembles nothing so much as the collective voice of the shadow.26 The second point illustrated by “Shadow” has less to do with the tale proper than with Poe’s sense of a determining material environment. In many ways the environment of “Shadow” constitutes a kind of negative image of the space described in “The Power of Words.” Whereas the latter tale portrays the stars as playthings of the poetic imagination, “Shadow” describes an antithetical universe in which the stars control “the souls, imaginations, and meditations of mankind” (PT, 218). As demonstrated in previous chapters, Poe perceived a similar determinism in his own publishing environment, whose laws could not be evaded “even by the inspired.” Poe’s darker sense of his era contrasts starkly with the account of McLuhan cited in the epigraph to this chapter. According to McLuhan, the explosion of markets and advertising created a veritable information utopia for “the ordinary man in 1830.” Since Poe’s perspective had much more to do with production than consumption, it is perhaps appropriate to consider an alternative description by Marx, especially since Marx is McLuhan’s chosen foe. Unlike McLuhan, Marx saw nothing utopian in the condition of ordinary workers during this period, nor did he view the explosion of advertising as a special boon to human enlightenment. But of all the statements by Marx that might be used to characterize Poe’s


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environment, I would like to single out a minor passage from the Grundrisse, where Marx borrows from astronomy to explain how one form of production takes dominion over all: In every form of society there is a particular [branch of] production which determines the position and importance of all the others, and the relations obtaining in this branch accordingly determine those in all other branches. It is the general light tingeing all other colours and modifying them in their specific quality; it is a special ether determining the specific gravity of everything found in it. (Collected Works 28:43)

Marx is referring to industrial capitalism in general, but as we have seen, the antebellum publishing industry functioned as one of the most advanced branches of production in the American economy. It is possible, moreover, to apply Marx’s metaphor to the publishing industry itself, so that as industrial capital determined the position and importance of other sectors of production, there was also a form of capital within the publishing environment that tinged and modified all other forms of signification. Although Poe called it “thinking material,” I have used the simpler name of information to designate the kind of written or otherwise objectified knowledge that re-enters the process of production and thereby valorizes capital. In doing so, I have tried to facilitate the conceptual leap from “historical context,” where an endless multiplicity of details vie for explanatory power, to publishing environment, where one form of meaning dominates all others, and where one reader—the Capital Reader—mediates all relations between the commercial writer and the mass audience. I believe that some such account of forces and relations should inform any study of Poe’s culture, certainly any study which aspires to grasp Poe in his historical and material specificity. But I cannot advertise this method as a magical device to exempt readers from the necessary labor of interpretation. Ultimately, an account of a material environment can only serve as a kind of summons, beckoning us to search beyond the shadows and the stars.

. . . . . The indirect gaze, when guided by the tougher knowledges of history and political economy, seems always to divulge some unsuspected affinity between the sublime and the bottom line. During the same period that Poe was founding a popular literary genre with the three Dupin tales, he produced three angelic dialogues that were apparently indifferent to the selective pressures of the literary market. It is therefore tempting to view “The Power of Words” as a kind of curiosity of literary evolution—the last survivor of a genre destined for extinction. As we have seen, however, even angelic dialogues register the traces of economic struggle, and although “The Power of Words”

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fails to empower, it does embody Poe’s desire to create a material language uncensorable by the Capital Reader. The detective story reflects similar desires, although it follows a radically different strategy of adaptation and evolution. In the tales of ratiocination, Poe universalizes latent tendencies of the capitalist publishing industry to imagine a culture where signs are not read but instead bought, sold, and stolen. In the angelic dialogues, Poe strives to compensate for this economic materialism by propounding a poetic materialism that finds sublime meaning in the very arrangement of atoms. Unfortunately, the material poetry that human beings speak into existence can only be read by angels, and these angels are themselves doomed to thirst after knowledge they can never possess. Faced with an inescapable and contradictory signifying environment, Poe was compelled to reconsider the precise value of cultural production under capitalism. The depth of his reconsideration indicates that, however distant he may have been from the main currents of American thought, he was nevertheless immersed in the main currents of American historical development. The rise of information as a dominant form of meaning induced him to reject the old profundities, first by redefining literary creation as the combination of already existing ideas, and then by relocating literary meaning to the surfaces of culture. While engaged in these strategic revisions, Poe also struggled to confront the emergence of the literate masses, on whom he grew increasingly dependent for success and survival. In his more worldly moments, Poe viewed the tale, especially the detective story, as a literary form which could succeed in the mass market while containing the more dangerous tendencies of the mob. At other times, however, he wavered between fantasies of material creation and material annihilation. The former fantasy is best embodied by “The Power of Words,” where the dead awaken to discover that their earthly pains have been transformed into celestial poems for angelic readers. At the other extreme, Poe feared that the mob, by developing its own common knowledge and its own collective voice, would not only render his labor obsolete, but would also extinguish his unique artistic soul. This darker fantasy is dramatized in Eureka, where Poe draws upon scientific discourse to naturalize the collapse of individual identity into what he calls the “general consciousness.” The transition from individual subjectivity to collective thought is here portrayed as an inevitable catastrophe, an apocalyptic moment when “the majestic remnants of the tribe of stars will flash, at length, into a common embrace” (PT, 1353). Information, the form taken by capital in the signifying environment, would presumably vanish from this transfigured social space, but Poe is unable to offer any replacement. To those who labor in the culture industry, the unity of a collectivity presents itself as a “nothingness” (PT, 1355), as a final horizon beyond which the mass cultural text would cease to signify. The enduring fascination with Poe therefore indicates what should be as obvious as Dupin’s letter: our own signification continues to subsist under the


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shadow of the Capital Reader. But it should also be obvious that we are not doomed to an environment of eternal darkness. Arising from the increasing productive powers of collective labor, this environment has long harbored the potential to transform its vast accumulation into a genuine collective resource. Such a transformation would necessarily spell the demise of information, bringing this prehistory of common knowledge to a close.


NOTES

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION: MINOR WRITING AND THE CAPITAL READER

1. “Letter to Mr. —— ——,” Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984), 14. Henceforth referred to as PT. 2. Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents of American Thought, vol. 2 (1927; New York: Harvest-HBJ, 1954), 56; F. O. Matthiessen, “Edgar Allan Poe,” Literary History of the United States, ed. Robert E. Spiller et al. 3rd ed. (1948; New York: Macmillan, 1963), 321, 323; Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1941), 271; Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 206. Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 148. According to Silverman, “Poe for the most part lived and wrote apart from the whirl, preoccupied with feeding himself and family, imagining a ghostly afterlife” (148). Finally, see Louis D. Rubin, Jr., The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 178. 3. This advice came from John Pendleton Kennedy, novelist and congressman from Baltimore. See Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson, The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987), 149. Henceforth referred to as Poe Log. 4. White to Minor, 17 February 1835. Quoted in David K. Jackson, Poe and the Southern Literary Messenger (Richmond: Dietz Press, 1934), 94. 5. Lucian Minor, “Letters from New England,” Southern Literary Messenger 1 (April 1835): 425. 6. Lucian Minor, “The New Year,” Southern Literary Messenger 4 ( Jan. 1838): 1. 7. For an informative account of Minor’s life, especially between the years 1833 and 1838, see James Norman McKean, “Lucian Minor: Cosmopolitan Virginia Gentleman of the Old School,” M.A. thesis, College of William and Mary, 1948. 8. In his pathbreaking article “American Romanticism and the Depression of 1837,” for example, William Charvat refers to Poe only grudgingly: on one occasion to observe dismissively that he “of course, was rarely out of financial difficulties, be the times good or bad”; and on another occasion, to claim that a minor sketch called “The Business Man” was “Poe’s only literary reaction to the depression.” See Charvat, Science and Society 2 (winter 1937): 75, 78. Given the state of critical practice at the time, Charvat understandably measures a text’s “literary reaction” to history by its class affiliation and thematic content. In what follows I measure history on a broader scale in order to explore why Poe tended to register social antagonisms primarily at the level of form. 9. R. Jackson Wilson, Figures of Speech: American Writers and the Literary Marketplace, From Benjamin Franklin to Emily Dickinson (New York: Knopf, 1989). See also Alan Trachtenberg’s review, “Writers and the Market,” The Nation 249.1 ( July 3, 1989): 23–24. 10. Michael T. Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 12.

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11. George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1951). According to Taylor, the transportation revolution was accompanied by “equally drastic improvements in communication” (149). Although such accounts can be denounced as inadequate and totalizing, it is important to recognize that many of these narratives or ideologies were enormously powerful in their own time—so powerful that they were not perceived as stories at all, but as expressions of common sense or as articles of national faith. Even in hindsight, it is misguided to dismiss historical narrative altogether, especially given the widespread tendency to replace one narrative with another: the story of manifest destiny giving way, for example, to new stories of technological progress, political empowerment, westward expansion, or capitalist development. For the purposes of this study, I am accordingly less concerned with ranking narratives on the scale of overall correctness than with using all available light to explore relation between literary production and production in general. 12. November 1844 letter to Charles Anthon, in The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom (1948; New York: Gordian Press, 1966), 1:268. Henceforth referred to as Letters. 13. Quoted in Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 211. Henceforth referred to as ER. 14. Poe to Charles Anthon, late October, 1844. Letters, 1:271. 15. For mentions of “literary commodities” and “literary enterprises,” see The Broadway Journal, 23 August 1845. Burton Pollin attributes this unsigned editorial comment to Poe in Pollin, ed., The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Gordian Press, 1986), 4:178. On the salability of literature, see, for example, Poe’s 27 September 1842 letter to Thomas H. Chivers, Letters, 1:216. 16. Poe to White, 30 April 1835; Letters, 1:57–58. 17. Letters, 1:57–58. Poe explicitly eschews “simplicity” as an aesthetic principle for a commercial magazine: “Nobody is more aware than I am that simplicity is the cant of the day—but take my word for it no one cares any thing about simplicity in their hearts” (Letters, 1:58). This is undoubtedly a reference to the position articulated by James E. Heath in his “Editorial Remarks” for the January 1835 Southern Literary Messenger: “Simplicity, unaffected simplicity, is the great rule in composition, as it is in the manners and conduct of life” (SLM 1:255). In this same article Heath maintains that the Messenger “shall not be the vehicle of sentiments at war with the interests of virtue and sound morals—the only true and solid foundation of human happiness” (255). In 1839, Heath again invoked this position to reject a tale Poe had submitted to the Messenger. According to Heath, the tale in question (“The Fall of the House of Usher”) belongs to the “German school” because of its “wild, improbable, and terrible” incidents. See I. M. Walker, ed., Edgar Allan Poe: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 110. In the preface to his 1840 Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Poe rejected the charge of “Germanism” just as he had earlier rejected Heath’s advocacy of simplicity: “But the truth is that, with a single exception, there is no one of these stories in which the scholar should recognise the distinctive features of that species of pseudo-horror which we are taught to call Germanic, for no better reason than that some of the secondary names of German literature have become identified with its folly. If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul” (PT, 129).

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18. See Reginald Charles McGrane, The Panic of 1837 (1924; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 1. The view that literature in some way precedes capitalism takes numerous forms. For example, when Michael Gilmore argues that authors such as Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville “sought to combat the effects of commercialization on their writing,” he implies that literature originates and thrives for some indefinite period of time outside of a capitalist publishing industry. 19. 27 September 1842 letter to Thomas H. Chivers (Letters, 1:216). For Poe’s earlier aspirations to be a poet, see Letters, 1:19, 32. 20. ER, 1025. Because of this emphasis on circulation and the manufacture of “pseudo-public opinion,” I use the phrase mass culture rather than popular culture. “Popular” implies free and informed choice on the part of consumers, and as we shall see, Poe was skeptical (if not terrified) of the common taste and the common good. 21. Paulding to Thomas W. White, 3 March 1836, in The Letters of James Kirke Paulding, ed. Ralph M. Aderman (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), 173– 74. On 17 March 1836, Paulding repeated these sentiments in a letter written directly to Poe: “Harpers . . . will be I presume, governed by the judgement of their Reader, who from long experience can tell almost to a certainty what will succeed. I am destitute of this valuable instinct, and my opinion counts for nothing with publishers” (Letters, 178). Eugene Exman identifies this reader as John Inman. See Exman, The Brothers Harper (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 80. 22. This policy was first announced in 1830, when Harpers began advertising the fact that “several gentlemen of high literary acquirements and correct taste” had been engaged to ensure that “no works will be published by J. & J. H. Harper but such as are interesting, instructive, and moral.” Quoted in Exman, The Brothers Harper, 22. In 1837, Asa Greene, a contemporary of Poe’s, made the same point with a more colorful simile: “But to return to the great publishing house of Harper & Brothers. Though these gentlemen publish so much, they are exceedingly cautious as to the character of their publications. As certain kings and great men, of whom we read, used, in former times, to keep a taster, whose business it was to see that the food was not poisoned: so do Harper & Brothers employ a reader, to whose critical judgement and moral taste are subjected all new works, whether American or imported, and without whose sanction none of these works are ever permitted to see the light.” See Asa Greene, M.D., A Glance at New York (New York, 1837), 152. A portion of this passage is also quoted in Exman, The Brothers Harper, 22. 23. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 254– 55. 24. Review of Theodorick Bland’s Reports of Cases decided in the High Court of Chancery of Maryland, in Southern Literary Messenger 2 (October 1836): 731. Not incidentally, this closely resembles the image of Pym groping through piles of lumber in the hold of the Grampus (see Chapter Six for further discussion of Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym). 25. ER, 1318. For a discussion of the probable source of this passage, see Chapter Two. 26. When Poe alludes to the gold which breeds yet more gold, he clearly refers not to mere metal but to the medium of exchange which, under capitalist relations of production, facilitates the creation of surplus value and the theoretically limitless accumulation of wealth. Given Poe’s extensive understanding of political economy, it is

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especially significant that he should draw a comparison between knowledge and gold, between productive reading and what Marx calls “self-expanding value” (Capital, 1:255). In this same chapter (on “The General Formula for Capital”), Marx also discusses the limitless and quantitative character of capitalism: “Therefore the final result of each separate cycle, in which a purchase and a consequent sale are completed, forms of itself the starting-point for a new cycle. The simple circulation of commodities—selling in order to buy—is a means to a final goal which lies outside circulation, namely the appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of needs. As against this, the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself, for the valorization of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The movement of capital is therefore limitless” (253). 27. E. A. Poe to Washington Poe, 15 August 1840, Letters, 1:143. See also Poe to Charles Anthon, Letters, 1:270. 28. For Poe’s faith in technology, see his article on “Anastatic Printing,” where he argues that “the value of every book is a compound of its literary and its physical or mechanical value as the product of physical labor applied to the physical material.” Although physical value dominates the publishing industry, Poe believes that a new printing method will “give ascendancy to the literary value,” thereby enabling the humblest to “speak as often and as freely as the most exalted.” “Anastatic Printing,” Broadway Journal 1 ( January 1845): 15. Rpt. in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, 17 vols. (1902; New York: AMS Press, 1965), 14:158. Henceforth referred to as Complete Works. See Chapter Two for further discussion of “Anastatic Printing.” 29. Poe to Frederick W. Thomas, 25 February 1843, Letters, 1:224. 30. For more discussion of Poe’s editorial designs, see Chapter Three. His conscious effort to evade capitalist control challenges the assumption that “literature” and “capitalism” designate practices that are somehow discrete or even autonomous. As Poe maintained near the end of his life, a magazine “would be useless to me, even when established, if not entirely out of the control of a publisher” (Letters, 2:359). He expressed this more bluntly when he told another correspondent that “I am resolved to be my own publisher. To be controlled is to be ruined” (Letters, 2:356). Such thoughts never occurred to Lucian Minor. Although Minor and Poe wrote for the same magazine and responded to the same cultural context, they occupied completely distinct positions in the process of literary production. However crude or indelicate, such material differences had far-reaching consequences. Any attempt to historicize Poe, or to explore the nexus of knowledge and power in antebellum America, must somehow account for both the gross and the subtle effects of an emerging capitalist economy. 31. Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (1965; New York: Vintage, 1970), 113. Frederick Engels’s September 1890 letter to Joseph Bloch is reprinted in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 760–65. My criticism of the base-superstructure model is informed by Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, 75–82. For discussions of Western Marxism, see Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1979), and Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). The concept of mediation, connoting an indirect or even distorting connection between phenomena, is at least as old as Plato’s allegory of the cave. Later versions of this allegory, from Kant to Adorno and beyond, likewise describe a

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subject-object relationship mediated by language, ideology, conceptual categories, social institutions, or some other tertium quid. My particular concern here, however, is with the role of mediation in literary and cultural criticism. 32. I am grateful to Tim Dayton and Mike Speaks for this slogan. The notion of commercial writers being “summoned” by the Capital Reader recalls Althusser’s concept of interpellation. As to the need to avoid a premature hardening of theoretical propositions, cf. Engels’s 1890 letter to Conrad Schmidt: “Our conception of history is above all a guide to study, not a lever for construction after the manner of the Hegelians. All history must be studied afresh, the conditions of existence of the different formations of society must be individually examined.” Quoted in Maurice Dobb, On Economic Theory and Socialism (London: Routledge, 1955), 232–33. 33. See Mary Louise Pratt, “Interpretive Strategies/Strategic Interpretations: On Anglo-American Reader-Response Criticism,” Boundary 2, 11 (fall/winter 1982–83): 209. 34. The Capital Reader also challenges poststructuralist claims about the interminable free-play of meaning because such interpretive freedom accords all too well with Paulding’s description of a publishing environment that focuses less on how texts mean than on how they sell. In what has become his most famous proclamation, Roland Barthes derides the “Author” as a “culmination of capitalist ideology” which denies the “multiplicity of writing,” that is, the way that writing “ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning.” See Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 143, 147. Poe, who purportedly carries out a similar exemption of meaning, provides ample evidence that Barthes has mistaken a response to capitalism—the Author as supreme creator—for capitalism itself. In fact, Poe’s culture of surfaces bears an uncanny resemblance to Barthes’s space of writing which, having “nothing beneath,” can be “ranged over” but not “pierced” (147). This resemblance suggests that the publishing industry did more than marginalize the responses of readers: it also demanded that the birth of the Capital Reader be paid for—in advance—by the death of the author. CHAPTER TWO THE HORRID LAWS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY

1. Review of Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, and other Tales, in Graham’s Magazine, May 1841; reprinted in ER, 211. As suggested below, Dickens’s popularity often inspired Poe to contemplate the fate of literature in a capitalist publishing environment. 2. Reginald Charles McGrane, The Panic of 1837: Some Financial Problems of the Jacksonian Era (1924; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 1. 3. Poe to Charles Anthon, ante 2 November 1844, Letters, 1:270. 4. Hervey Allen, Israfel, 27. 5. John Allan to General John H. Cocke, 3 February 1817. Quoted in Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography, 70–71. 6. See Agnes M. Bondurant, Poe’s Richmond (Richmond: Garrett and Massie, 1942), Chapter One. For the use of slaves in manufacturing, see Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South 1820–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

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7. Henry Cogswell Knight, pseud. Arthur Singleton, quoted in Agnes Bondurant, Poe’s Richmond, 7. 8. Quoted in Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe, 10. 9. Hervey Allen, Israfel, 107. 10. Quoted in Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography, 57. In 1829, Poe expressed similar desires to John Neal, pointing out the possibilities for literary progress based on previous cultural accumulation: “I am young . . . am a poet . . . and wish to be so in the more common meaning of the word. I would give the world to embody one half the ideas afloat in my imagination. (By the way, do you remember— or did you ever read the exclamation of Shelley about Shakespeare?—‘What a number of ideas must have been afloat before such an author could arise!’)” (Letters, 1:32). It is impossible to ascertain the precise influence that John Allan’s views had on Poe, but it is certain that the two discussed, among other topics, poetry. As early as 1820, Allan took a manuscript of Poe’s juvenile verses to the school master Joseph Clarke, seeking advice about publishing it (Poe Log, 47). 11. Reproduced in Hervey Allen, Israfel, 76. 12. James J. Barnes, Authors, Publishers and Politicians: The Quest for an Anglo-American Copyright Agreement, 1815–1854 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), 1–29. 13. Thinking too wishfully about these minor improvements, Poe in 1845 proclaimed that “the day of ‘cheap literature’ is, we thank Heaven, happily over.” See Poe, The Broadway Journal 2 (19 July 1845): 27. Poe’s optimism may have been somewhat forced, since he was, for a variety of reasons, beholden to Wiley and Putnam. Wiley and Putnam advertized in The Broadway Journal; they had recently published Poe’s Tales; and they would later publish The Raven and Other Poems. Moreover, even though Wiley and Putnam’s new book series seemed to signal a recovery in the publishing industry, it was still necessary to “unite the suffrages.” As Poe explains, the publisher had to select books which struck “a happy medium between the stilted and the jejune—between the ponderous and the ephemeral. Works were required of a piquancy to render them at once popular, (for the immediate and extensive sale of the Library was indispensable) and at the same time, of a gravity which would . . . warrant their preservation in our book-cases” (27–28). 14. See Poe’s remarks on Freeman Hunt in ER, 1147–49. The table of contents was quoted by Poe in The Broadway Journal, 27 December 1845; reprinted in Collected Writings, 3:353. 15. Complete Works, 14:38. 16. Space permits but a few examples. Pinakidia number 8: “A religious hubbub, such as the world has seldom seen, was excited during the reign of Frederic II, by the imagined virulence of a book entitled ‘The Three Impostors.’ It was attributed to Pierre des Vignes, chancellor of the king, who was accused by the Pope of having treated the religions of Moses, Jesus, and Mahomet as political fables. The work in question, however, which was squabbled about, abused, defended, and familiarly quoted by all parties, is well proved never to have existed.” Number 46: “Martin Luther in his reply to Henry VIIIth’s book by which the latter acquired the title of ‘Defender of the Faith,’ calls the monarch very unceremoniously ‘a pig, an ass, a dunghill, the spawn of an adder, a basilisk, a lying buffoon dressed in a king’s robes, a mad fool with a frothy


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mouth and a whorish face.”’ Number 113: “Quintilian mentions a pedant who taught obscurity, and who was wont to say to his scholars, ‘This is excellent—I do not understand it myself.’ ” 17. William Charvat, “American Romanticism and the Depression of 1837,” Science and Society 2 (winter 1937): 75, 78. 18. Sometimes these studies draw from texts that were only paraphrased by Poe, or that were mistakenly attributed to him. Ernest Marchand, for example, portrays Poe as a conservative Virginia gentleman who was hostile to “democracy, industrialism, and reform,” but as demonstrated in Chapter Five, Marchand’s influential study derives Poe’s position on feminism and slavery from articles that were actually written by Beverley Tucker. See Ernest Marchand, “Poe as a Social Critic,” American Literature 6.1 (March 1934): 28–43; reprinted in On Poe: The Best from “American Literature,” ed. Louis J. Budd and Edwin H. Cady (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 24–39. 19. Thomas to Poe, 10 July 1845. File 1053 of the Griswold Collection, Boston Public Library. 20. For a full analysis of Poe’s response to the political struggle over slavery, see Chapter Five. 21. Quoted in John William Ward, “The Age of the Common Man,” The Reconstruction of American History, ed. John Higham (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), 85. 22. Poe, “A Few Words on Etiquette,” Godey’s 33 (August 1846): 87. 23. Poe, review of Orion by R. H. Horne, in Graham’s Magazine, March 1844; reprinted in ER, 302. 24. Beginning in 1837, this prospectus appeared on the cover of many issues of the Messenger. Poe’s co-editor at the Broadway Journal was Charles F. Briggs; the quotation appears in Bette S. Weidman, “The Broadway Journal (2): A Casualty of Abolition Politics,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 73 (February 1969): 108. For more on Briggs’s fears about mixing abolitionist politics and literary business, see Chapter Five. 25. This is Henry Clay’s version. In 1830 James K. Polk, a critic of this plan, redefined the American System as speculation in land, high import duties, and a massive campaign of internal improvements (leaving the bank out of the formula). See Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1945), 62. For an account of how the Democrats demonized the Bank of the United States, see Chapter Seven. 26. “Public Land Sales of the United States,” New-York Mirror 1.18 (8 February 1845): 276–77. (The “Raven” appears on p. 276.) Similar, progressive views of education were touted in the schools themselves. Poe’s schoolmaster in Richmond, for example, touted a new instructional method “which equally facilitates the student’s proficiency and diminishes his labor,” thereby enabling the student to master three languages in less time than it formerly took to learn one (Poe Log, 42). 27. Lucian Minor, “An Address on Education,” Southern Literary Messenger 2 (December 1835): 18. 28. Poe, “Minor’s Address,” Southern Literary Messenger 2 (December 1835): 66–67. Poe’s commitment to progress may be questioned, but he certainly realized that literacy was a prerequisite to the growth of the Southern literary market. 29. George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution (New York: Holt, Rinehart

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and Winston, 1951), 149. Ronald Zboray justifiably disputes the view that early improvements in transportation led to a truly national literature and reading public, but he nevertheless identifies a link between transportation and the literary market. According to Zboray, “the improved communication and increasing level of economic growth accompanying the age of rail did spark an explosion in book sales and in the circulation of periodicals in the Northeast.” See Ronald J. Zboray, “The Transportation Revolution and Antebellum Book Distribution Reconsidered,” American Quarterly 38.1 (1986): 64. 30. Edgar Allan Poe, the Philadelphia Public Ledger, 17 July 1844; reprinted in Doings of Gotham, ed. Jacob E. Spannuth and Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Pottsville, PA: Spannuth, 1929), 79. 31. Poe, “Street-Paving,” The Broadway Journal 1 (19 March 1845): 241. 32. For Poe’s changing view of Reynolds, see Robert F. Almy, “J. N. Reynolds: A Brief Biography with Particular Reference to Poe and Symmes,” Colophon n.s. 2 (winter 1937): 227–45; and Aubrey Starke, “Poe’s Friend Reynolds,” American Literature 11 (May 1939): 152–59. 33. Poe, “A Chapter on Science and Art,” Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine 6 (March 1840): 149. Smithson, a British chemist, had left a bequest “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men”; this led to the founding of the Smithsonian Institution in 1846. 34. “Delta,” “The Smithsonian Institute,” Southern Literary Messenger 6 ( January 1840): 25–34. From this article, Poe borrowed many of the opening remarks for his “own” position (“A Chapter on Science and Art,” 149). More important borrowings appear later in Poe’s “Chapter.” Poe, for example, writes that, “We want means for the immediate development of all our powers and resources.” The Messenger text proclaims, “We want means for the rapid development of all our powers—means for the rapid development of all our resources” (31). In addition, Poe writes: “It may be said, moreover, in favor of physical knowledge, that it is the property not of any individual, or of any people, but of mankind. All are interested in its pursuit; its profits all share; and herein consists its great superiority to mere literature.” Once again, this is a close paraphrase of the Messenger text: “Physical knowledge is not the property of any part of mankind, but the property of all. The pursuit of it, is what all are interested in—the profits of it, all share; and herein consists the vast superiority which it possesses over mere literature” (32). Poe breaks off at the point where the Messenger correspondent launches a protracted denigration of literature, so it could be argued that Poe reveals his true sentiments by the pattern of his thefts and borrowings. But this is not what we commonly mean by “true.” 35. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” from The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 341. 36. ER, 165. For a comparison of Poe’s paraphrase with Chorley’s original text, see Robert D. Jacobs, Poe: Journalist and Critic (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 127–30. 37. See Robert E. Spiller, “Art in the Marketplace,” Literary History of the United States, 3rd. ed., ed. Spiller et al. (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 236–37. See also James J. Barnes, Authors, Publishers and Politicians: The Quest for an Anglo-American Copyright Agreement 1815–1854, passim.


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38. In the “Philosophy of Composition,” Poe in fact takes a perverse delight in showing (or pretending) that “The Raven” did not flow from some “fine frenzy” or “ecstatic intuition,” but instead proceeded “step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.” In a letter to his friend Frederick Thomas, Poe further maintains that the poem was written “for the express purpose of running” (Letters, 1:287). 39. Graham’s Magazine, January 1842; reprinted in ER, 1029. 40. See, for example, Frank Bourgin, The Great Challenge: The Myth of Laissez-Faire in the Early Republic (New York: George Braziller, 1989), Chapters Six, Eight, and Nine. 41. Mann, “Annual Report of 1848,” quoted in James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 21. 42. Quoted in Frank Bourgin, The Great Challenge, 136. 43. Hemphill quoted in Bourgin, The Great Challenge, 161. Calhoun quoted in Bourgin, The Great Challenge, 164. 44. Labor statistics from Richard R. John, Managing the Mails: The Postal System, Public Policy, and American Political Culture, 1823–1836, diss., Harvard University, 1989 (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1989; 8926125), 9. On attitudes toward federal expenditures, see Carter Goodrich, “The Revulsion against Internal Improvements,” Journal of Economic History 10 (November 1950): 161; quoted in Richard John, Managing the Mails, 157, n. 271. 45. James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: The Technological Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 184–85. See also Robert G. Albion, “The ‘Communication Revolution,’ ” American Historical Review 37 ( July 1932): 718–20. According to Albion, “In American history, however, the ‘Communication Revolution’ was a thing apart for it had performed wonders while our industries were still legitimate ‘infants.’ The turnpikes, canals, steamboats, and railroads were knitting the country together and pushing the frontier westward quite irrespective of the growth of American cotton mills or iron foundries” (719). The point is well taken, although I would contend that the communications infrastructure was not truly “a thing apart,” because it anticipated and ultimately necessitated industrial development. In addition, it is important to recall the obvious, namely that wagons, boats, and rail cars did not travel empty; among other things, they carried lumber, coal, textiles, people, cotton, and wheat. 46. In other words, the items communicated were predominantly means of production or information goods rather than means of consumption or entertainment commodities. Ultimately, of course, consumption and production tend toward equilibrium and are therefore two moments of the same economic unity, but these moments can be separated by time as well as distance. 47. William M. Campbell (St. Charles, MO) to Charles C. Campbell (Petersburg, VA), 27 September 1837. Box 3, Folder 99 of the Charles Campbell Papers, Swem Library, College of William and Mary. 48. See for example ER, 1377 and Letters, 1:268. This subject is discussed at greater length in Chapter Four. 49. In this sense information resembles atmosphere or water, which according to Poe, we despise (as value) though we would die without it. Unlike air and water, however, information is an entirely social product embodying immense quantities of human labor. Under certain social formations, however, this labor is not registered in the price

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of commodities because the infrastructure enables information, once produced and “formed” into communicable units, to be duplicated and disseminated with ease. 50. Fritz Machlup, The Economics of Information and Human Capital, vol. 3 in the series Knowledge: Its Creation, Distribution, and Economic Significance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 20. 51. Paul Saffo, research fellow with the Institute for the Future, Menlo Park, CA. Quoted in Andrew Pollack, “An Avalanche of Information Is Coming to Video Screens,” New York Times, 23 July 1989. 52. Takeshi Murota defines a perishable information service as that which “does not maintain its service for the owner’s benefit once he sells it.” See Murota, “Demand and Supply Values of Information,” Information Economics and Policy 3 (1988): 31. 53. Poe to Kennedy, 21 June 1841, Letters, 1:164. 54. Poe to Charles Anthon, ante 2 November 1844, Letters, 1:270. 55. ER, 334. This formulation bears some resemblance to the position articulated by Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1759). There, Burke suggests that the “power of the imagination is incapable of producing anything new; it can only vary the disposition of those ideas which it has received from the senses.” Reprinted in Hazard Adams, Critical Theory Since Plato (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 306. It should be noted, however, that for Poe it is social tradition rather than individual sensation which provides the raw material for artistic combination. 56. Lucian Minor, “Selection in Reading,” Southern Literary Messenger 2 (February 1836): 19. 57. Margaret Fuller, New York Daily Tribune, 11 July 1845; reprinted in Edgar Allan Poe: The Critical Heritage, ed. I. M. Walker (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 176. 58. Southern Literary Messenger 1 (August 1834): 1. 59. Poe, “Magazine Writing—Peter Snook,” Broadway Journal 1, 7 June 1845; Complete Works, 14:73. 60. Poe’s review of Charles O’Malley, The Irish Dragoon by Harry Lorrequer (Charles James Lever), Graham’s Magazine, March 1842, reprinted in ER, 319. 61. William Charvat, The Origins of American Critical Thought 1810–1835 (1931; New York: Perpetua Books, 1961), 6. 62. Jay B. Hubbell, The South in American Literature 1607–1900 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1954), 215. 63. John Pendleton Kennedy noted in his diary that he had discovered Poe in a “state of starvation” and “brought him up from the very verge of despair” (Poe Log, 148–49). In 1841, Poe wrote to his friend Frederick W. Thomas that he was indebted to Kennedy “for life itself” (Letters, 1:172). 64. Poe, review of The Poets and Poetry of America by Rufus Griswold, Boston Miscellany, November 1842; reprinted in ER, 550. 65. Letters, 1:58. Further into his career, Poe developed a more critical attitude toward sales as the ultimate test of a publication. See for example Poe’s comments on Dickens (ER, 225). 66. Burton Pollin, ed., “The Living Writers of America: A Manuscript by Edgar Allan Poe,” Studies in the American Renaissance 1991, ed. Joel Myerson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 168.


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67. Poe uses “intrinsic value” in a restricted, economic sense. This is demonstrated in 1846 when he disparages a special gift given to A. J. Downing by the queen of Holland. Poe hopes that, for Mr. Downing’s sake, the gift (a ruby ring) has intrinsic value, because Her Majesty’s literary judgment is worthless. Then, catching himself in an imprecision, Poe immediately corrects himself: “We use the words ‘intrinsic value’ not rigorously, but in distinction from the factitious value which, in the public eye, appertains to the present as that of a monarch . . .” (ER, 112). 68. See The Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York: Modern Library, 1937), 28. Poe’s references to rivers full of Johannisberger (ER, 978) and to “water we drink and die without, yet despise” (ER, 211) may also derive from Smith, who in the same passage points out that “Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarce any thing; scarce any thing can be had in exchange for it” (28). Smith, by the way, likewise believed that little social benefit would result from an increased production of gold (173). 69. See Poe, “Draper’s Lecture,” Southern Literary Messenger 2 (August 1836): 596. Significantly, when Poe in 1844 repeats the phrase about knowledge increasing in “geometrical ratio,” he refers to knowledge residing in the brain of a solitary intellectual rather than in the community of scientists or in what Marx called “the social mind” (Collected Works, 29:84). The reasons for Poe’s later dislike of Draper are not entirely clear. Perhaps Draper represented the kind of narrow-minded science that Poe criticizes in Eureka, or perhaps Poe was insulted when Draper professed no knowledge of Poe or his magazine project (Poe Log, 793). 70. PT, 1265. In a letter written several months after “Von Kempelen,” Poe makes it clear that Draper is one of the main targets of Eureka: “By a singular coincidence, [Draper] is the chief of that very sect of Hog-ites to whom I refer as ‘the most intolerant & intolerable set of bigots & tyrants that ever existed on the face of the Earth.’ I had him especially in view when I wrote the passage. A merely perceptive man with no intrinsic force—no power of generalization—in short a pompous nobody. He is aware (for there have been plenty to tell him) that I intend him in ‘Eureka’ ” (Letters 2: 449). Poe’s criticism of the “Hog-ites” is not entirely fair, since Bacon aspired to move from the facts to the general laws, and since he viewed his approach as a corrective to the sophistical methods inherited from the theological debates of the Middle Ages. 71. William Charvat, Literary Publishing in America, 74. 72. Poe, “Raumer’s England,” Southern Literary Messenger 2 ( July 1836): 507. 73. “Raumer’s England,” 508–9. The entire passage is derived—nearly verbatim— from Letter LXV (“Finances”) of Raumer’s text. See Frederick Von Raumer, England in 1835, 3 vols. (London, 1836; reprint, Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1971), 3:268. 74. “Anastatic Printing,” Broadway Journal 1 ( January 1845): 15; the article is reprinted in Complete Works, 14:153–59. This and other reports on new inventions should be classified as science fiction. See, for example, Poe’s 15 January 1840 article on the daguerreotype in Edgar Allan Poe’s Contributions to “Alexander’s Weekly Messenger,” ed. Clarence I. Brigham (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1943), 21–22. According to Poe, “it is a theorem almost demonstrated, that the consequence of any new scientific invention will, at the present day exceed, by very much, the wildest expectations of the most imaginative.”

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75. Complete Works, 14:158. Compare this political metaphor with the 1834 Prospectus for the Southern Literary Messenger: “In the annals of the republic of letters, the present may be distinguished as the era of ‘periodical literature.’ This circumstance, in truth, constitutes the literary world emphatically a ‘Republic.’ Now, (as ever,) the truly eminent occupy the loftiest stations; but now, also, [the] less gifted are not compelled ‘to hide their diminished heads’ in the awful presence of some Magog of literature, who maintains despotic and undisputed sway over the realms of intellect.” Dated 1 August 1834; printed on the inside cover (ii) of the August 1834 Messenger. 76. See Letters, 1:151, 1:154 and 2:694. 77. This corresponds with the coalition strategy outlined in Poe’s 1844 letter to Lowell (Letters, 1:247), where the intent is to escape the domination of large publishers. 78. Trotsky’s observations on Russian industrialization are apropos to this context as well. According to Trotsky, backward nations do not necessarily repeat the developmental stages of advanced capitalist societies. Instead, they can skip intermediate stages through a process of combined and uneven development: The laws of history have nothing in common with a pedantic schematism. Unevenness, the most general law of the historic process, reveals itself most sharply and complexly in the destiny of backward countries. Under the whip of external necessity their backward culture is compelled to make leaps. From the universal law of unevenness thus derives another law which, for the lack of a better name, we may call the law of combined development—by which we mean a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms. Without this law, to be taken of course in its whole material content, it is impossible to understand the history of Russia, and indeed of any country of the second, third or tenth cultural class.

See Leon Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, ed. F. W. Dupee (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), 4. 79. The theme of “vassalage” to the North would become especially prominent during the sectional crisis from 1846–51. See James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, 92–93. In 1857, Hinton Helper likewise complained of “the literary vassalage of the South to the North,” although he of course blamed this vassalage, and Southern backwardness in general, on slavery. See Helper, The Impending Crisis, reprinted in Antebellum, ed. Harvey Wish (New York: Capricorn, 1960), 239. 80. Southern Literary Messenger 1 (August 1834): 2. 81. James E. Heath to Charles Campbell, 27 August 1839. Box 3, Folder 145, Charles Campbell Papers, Swem Library, College of William and Mary. CHAPTER THREE FABLES OF CIRCULATION: POE’S INFLUENCE ON THE MESSENGER

1. John Henry Ingram, Edgar Allan Poe: His Life, Letters, and Opinions (1880; New York: AMS Press, 1965), 104–5. 2. George E. Woodberry, The Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), 184–85. 3. Hervey Allen, Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1934), 326, n. 493.


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4. Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1941), 262. 5. In 1838 White complained: “It is truly mortifying to the Proprietor of the Messenger, to be obliged to remind his subscribers again and again that he stands in need of the balances due to him. . . . Notwithstanding the terms must have been known to every one who subscribed [sic], still there are many who have failed to comply with them. Indeed there are some who owe for the work from its very commencement— others who are in arrear for three years—and a greater number still who owe for the 3d and 4th volumes. The balances due amount to between $3000 and $4000.” Southern Literary Messenger 4 (November 1838), inside cover, ii. 6. See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 256. For a rare treatment of Poe’s correspondence, see J. Gerald Kennedy, Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 89–113. Kennedy rightly contends that “if letters cannot be read as a concerted and sustained narrative, they nevertheless disclose verbal tendencies and imaginative preoccupations” (90). I must, however, dispute Kennedy’s description of the Stylus as an “abortive scheme for symbolic immortality” (112). Based upon the evidence of this chapter, Poe’s magazine project had less to do with symbolic immortality than with creative freedom and material survival. 7. See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (New York: Anchor Books, 1960), especially Chapter 2, “The Romantic Artist” (33–52). 8. See, for example, the review of Drake and Halleck (ER, 505–539) and “The Philosophy of Composition” (ER, 13–25). 9. [Poe], “The Southern Literary Messenger,” Broadway Journal 1 (22 March 1845): 183. 10. ER, 742; originally published in the Broadway Journal, 29 March 1845. 11. Collected Works, 1:553. 12. Henry B. Hirst, Philadelphia Saturday Museum, vol. 1, no. 13 (4 March 1843): 1. This is described as a corrected reprint from the 25 February 1843 Museum, though that issue has not been located. The biography (sans poems and portrait) was reprinted in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter 13 (29 July 1843). 13. The biography commences with the following acknowledgment: “For the materials of the present biography, we are indebted, partly to information derived from the late Thomas W. White, Proprietor of the ‘Southern Literary Messenger,’ but, principally, to memoranda furnished us by the well known author of ‘Clinton Bradshaw,’— Frederic W. Thomas, Esq.—who has enjoyed a better opportunity of intimate acquaintance with the subject of our sketch, than, perhaps, any man in America.” 14. Quoted in James H. Whitty, “Memoir,” The Complete Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), xlvii; also quoted in Dwight Thomas, “Poe in Philadelphia,” 501–2. 15. In several issues of Volume One, White includes the following statement as one of the “Conditions” of his magazine: “A regular list of payments as made by subscribers, will be published on the cover of each number. This plan is adopted, to save the trouble and expense of transmitting receipts.” See the covers for Issue 8 (April) and Issue 10 ( June), 1835. Starting with Issue 3 (November 1834), White had standardized the form of the List of Payments. Near the top of each list was a set of “inclusive” dates indicating

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when the payments had arrived, and beneath this was a statement emphasizing White’s desire to publish accurate records: “Should any payment be omitted, the Publisher respectfully begs the fact may be communicated to him, and the necessary credit shall be given in the succeeding number of the Messenger.” White was true to his word; although he made few mistakes, he did on several occasions identify paying subscribers who had been omitted, for one reason or another, from the payment list of a previous issue. 16. See White to Lucian Minor, 21 September 1835; rpt. in David K. Jackson, Poe and the “Southern Literary Messenger,” 99–100. 17. White to William Scott, 15 December 1836; quoted in Poe Log, 235–36. Also quoted, but misdated, in William Doyle Hull, “A Canon of the Critical Works of Edgar Allan Poe With a Study of Poe as Editor and Reviewer” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 1941), 63. 18. Poe Log, 237. Poe left Richmond altogether on January 19, 1837, but he did leave behind several pieces for Volume 3, including the opening section of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. White announced Poe’s departure in the January issue: “I deem it proper to inform my subscribers, and the public generally, that Mr. Poe, who has filled the editorial department for the last twelve months with so much ability, retired from that station on the 3d inst., and the entire management of the work again devolves on myself alone” (Southern Literary Messenger, 3:96). 19. Paid circulation is here defined as the sum of prepaid orders, orders paid for during the year of publication, and orders paid (tardily) during the two succeeding years. It should be noted that a substantial portion of the Messenger’s revenue came from late payments and the sale of back issues, but that the covers do not distinguish between the two (that is, between late payments for previous orders and payments for back issues, usually made by new subscribers seeking to aquire a more complete run of the magazine). 20. This correlation is confirmed by declining circulation figures after White’s death on 19 January 1843. Circulation probably started to fall immediately (during Matthew F. Maury’s custodial editorship), but it continued to decline under the control of Benjamin Blake Minor, who purchased the Messenger from White’s estate in July 1843. When Minor put the Messenger up for sale in 1847, John Moncure Daniel inspected the account books (since destroyed) and reported that the magazine was in “a very ticklish situation—subscribers have been falling off at the rate of 600 per annum for the last two years.” See Daniel to Charles Campbell, 24 September 1847; Box 6, Folder 81 of the Charles Campbell Papers, Swem Library, College of William and Mary. Daniel had offered $1,500 for the Messenger; Minor ultimately sold it to John R. Thompson for $2,000. 21. Broadway Journal 2 (8 November 1845): 276. Perry Miller cites Clark’s estimate in The Raven and the Whale (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1953), 13. Poe had begun treating the Knickerbocker as a competing magazine quite early in his career. In a May 1835 review, written before he returned to Richmond, Poe claimed that “The Messenger improves rapidly, and bids fair to rival, if not to surpass the Knickerbocker itself.” See David K. Jackson, “Four of Poe’s Critiques in the Baltimore Newspapers,” Modern Language Notes 50 (April 1935): 256. In an 1846 sketch of Clark for the “Literati” series, Poe undercuts the circulation figures more slyly: “What is the precise circulation of ‘The Knickerbocker’ at present I am unable to say; it has been variously


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stated at from eight to about eighteen hundred subscribers. The former estimate is no doubt too low, and the latter, I presume, is far too high. There are, perhaps, some fifteen hundred copies printed.”ee ER, 1206. 22. Poe does not, however, inflate the amount of payments to authors; instead he satirizes false claims of beneficence. 23. See Poe to Edward H. N. Patterson, April 1849: “I presume you know that during the second year of its existence, the ‘S. L. Messenger’ rose from less than 1000 to 5000 subs.” (Letters, 2:440). 24. Poe to Frederick W. Thomas, 25 February 1843, Letters, 1:224. The date of the Hirst biography sheds light on Poe’s tales of ratiocination, for it reveals that the same author who rewarded intellectuals in “The Gold-Bug” and “The Purloined Letter” did not expect to receive similar rewards in the American publishing industry, at least not for honest intellectual labor. 25. Sidney P. Moss, Poe’s Literary Battles: The Critic in the Context of His Literary Milieu (Durham: Duke University Press, 1963), 58–9. 26. White to William Scott, 24 November 1836; quoted in Poe Log, 234. See also White to Beverley Tucker, 19 January 1837; reprinted in David K. Jackson, Poe and the “Southern Literary Messenger,” 111–12. 27. Poe to Anthon, ante 2 November 1844, Letters, 1:268. Poe acknowledged that most magazine ventures failed, but he attributed this to “the impotency of their conductors, who made no scruple of basing their rules of action altogether upon what had been customarily done instead of what was now before them to do, in the greatly changed & constantly changing condition of things.” 28. Vincent Buranelli, Edgar Allan Poe, 2nd. Ed. (Indianapolis: G. K. Hall, 1977), 40. 29. David Galloway, “Introduction,” The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings (1967; Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1986), 34. 30. Galloway’s figures for the profits of Graham’s are also suspect. In the cited passage, he contends that “Poe’s work for Graham’s produced even more dramatic results: the magazine’s profits during the first year of his editorship were $25,000, but Poe never received more that $800 a year” (34). There were ostensibly 25,000 copies of the December 1841 issue, which does not mean that the magazine generated a $25,000 profit. Referring to later volumes of the magazine, which claimed even higher figures, Poe himself sought to distinguish circulation from revenue and revenue from profit: “The nature of this journal, however, was such, that even its 50,000 subscribers could not make it very profitable to its proprietor. Its price was $3—but not only were its expenses immense owing to the employment of absurd steel plates & other extravagances which tell not at all but recourse was had to innumerable agents who recd it at a discount of no less th[a]n 50 per cent” (Poe Log, 345, 476; Letters, 1:270). CHAPTER FOUR POE AND THE MASSES

1. De Bow’s Review 29 (1860): 613; quoted in Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities, 5. 2. Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theater in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 28. 3. James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution, 24.

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4. Allan R. Pred, The Spatial Dynamics of U.S. Urban-Industrial Growth, 1800–1914: Interpretive and Theoretical Essays (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1966), 171 (Table 4.5). 5. According to William Charvat, publishers in these two cities “were the discoverers and interpreters of American literary taste and were the channel through which the taste of the South and the West moved, to influence—for better or worse—the production of literature on the coast. And the New England writers had a national hearing precisely to the extent that they went to Philadelphia and New York to get it.” See Charvat, Literary Publishing in America, 37. 6. Allan R. Pred, The Spatial Dynamics of U.S. Urban-Industrial Growth, 174–75. 7. George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 151. See also Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 14–31. 8. Robins and Webster, “Cybernetic Capitalism: Information, Technology, Everyday Life,” in The Political Economy of Information, ed. Vincent Mosco and Janet Wasko (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 65. 9. Quoted in John E. Sawyer, “The Social Basis of the American System of Manufacturing,” The Journal of Economic History 14 (December 1954): 370, n. 11. 10. ER, 1116. Significantly, Poe imagines that after writers, politicians and lawyers would be among the first intellectual workers replaced by a thinking automaton. 11. See Marx, Grundrisse, in Collected Works, 29:80–99. 12. Cited in Robert G. Albion, Square-Riggers on Schedule: The New York Sailing Packets to England, France, and the Cotton Ports (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1938), 180. 13. The Broadway Journal, August 23, 1845. Burton Pollin attributes this unsigned editorial comment to Poe. See Pollin, ed., Collected Writings, 3:225. 14. On the debt to Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, see Arthur H. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography, 175. 15. George Tucker, Political Economy for the People (Philadelphia: C. Sherman & Son, 1859), 126–27. In his chapter on “Mental Industry,” Tucker also argues that “the want of capital is alone sufficient to render some discoveries and inventions that are pregnant with utility, valueless to their authors” (126). 16. For representative statements by Poe, see Letters, 1:247 and ER, 1027. For a discussion of Poe’s thoughts on annihilation, see Chapter Nine. 17. PT, 922. For more on cryptography and the mass audience, see Chapter Seven. 18. As preface to an 1844 series of articles for The Columbia Spy, Poe humorously depicted gossip as an indigenous discursive practice: “For, in fact, I must deal chiefly in gossip—in gossip, whose empire is unlimited, whose influence is universal, whose devotees are legion;—in gossip which is the true safety valve of society—engrossing at least seven-eights of the whole waking existence of mankind . . . clearly, your gossiper begins not at all. He is begun. He is already begun. He is always begun. In the manner of end he is indeterminate” (Doings of Gotham, 23). Autonomous signifying practices (such as gossip) hindered the expansion of the publishing industry and the literary market. Unlike an elite readership, the mass audience had precious little leisure time to fill, and magazines were therefore forced to compete against already existing forms of entertainment and communication. 19. See Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadel-


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phia, 1800–1865 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980); Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). On workingclass literature in the nineteenth century, see Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1987). 20. See the unflattering portrayal of merchants in, for example, “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob” and “The Business Man.” 21. Quoted in Arthur H. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, 85. 22. John Ward Ostrom, “Edgar A. Poe: His Income as Literary Entrepreneur,” Poe Studies 15.1 ( June 1982): 1. On Poe’s aristocratic pretensions, see Michael Allen, Poe and the British Magazine Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 182–98. Allen views the prospectus for The Stylus, which derides “cheap” literature, as a sign of Poe’s elitism, but I believe that it is necessary to distinguish between professed and real conditions of existence. 23. Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, 1839; Complete Works, 10:40. 24. Doings of Gotham, 34. Willis was then editor of the Evening Mirror. 25. In his preface to The Literati of New York City, Poe describes writers of genius as “a class proverbial for shunning society” (ER, 1119). 26. William Charvat, Literary Publishing in America, 97. 27. “The worth of a work is most accurately estimated, they assure us, by the number of those who peruse it; and ‘does a book sell?’ is a query embodying, in their opinion, all that need be said or sung on the topic of its fitness for sale” (ER, 225). 28. Part of this can be attributed to the fact that Dickens set his own precedents. Comparing Dickens and Bulwer, Poe offers the latter as a combinatory writer who, aided by rhetoric and “general information,” manages to construct books “which might be mistaken by ninety-nine readers out of a hundred for the genuine inspiration of genius.” Dickens alone, however, enchants both the masses and the critics, and through his originality he “has perfected a standard from which Art itself will derive its essence, in rules” (ER, 214). The problem is that Poe seems unable to describe these new rules. 29. Elsewhere in the review, Poe confesses that he was “prevented, through want of space, from showing how Mr. Dickens had so well succeeded in uniting all suffrages” (ER, 313). Space, of course, had nothing to do with it, since the second Barnaby Rudge review is one of Poe’s longest (ER, 224–44). Poe does, however, come up with a better explanation: “It is his close observation and imitation of nature here which have rendered him popular, while his higher qualities, with the ingenuity evinced in addressing the general taste, have secured him the good word of the informed and intellectual” (ER, 313). 30. Paulding to Thomas W. White, 3 March 1836, in Ralph M. Aderman, ed., The Letters of James Kirke Paulding, 173–74. 31. Poe to White, 30 April 1835; Letters, 1:57–58. For a discussion of the tale, see Chapter One. 32. Poe reiterates this position in the “The Philosophy of Composition,” where he claims that “it is the excess of the suggested meaning—it is the rendering this the upper instead of the under-current of the theme—which turns into prose (and that of the very flattest kind), the so-called poetry of the so-called transcendentalists” (ER, 24).

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33. Graham’s Magazine 13 (December 1843), 320. Quoted in Robert D. Jacobs, Poe: Journalist and Critic, 344–45. 34. Harper and Brothers to Poe, June 1836, quoted in Arthur H. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, 251. The “intermediary” was James K. Paulding. See Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson, Poe Log, 193. 35. William Preston Vaughn, The Antimasonic Party in the United States, 1826–1843 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), 10. 36. On Poe’s acquaintance with Wirt, see Arthur H. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, 186– 87. It is also worth noting that John Allan belonged to a Masonic Lodge in Richmond. See Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe, 13. 37. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Selected Tales and Sketches, ed. Michael J. Colacurcio (New York: Penguin, 1987), 386–87. 38. See, for example ER, 687. 39. ER, 580. Poe’s analysis of Hawthorne’s unpopularity and peculiarity corresponds closely to a May 1841 review of Hawthorne in the Arcturus (Poe identifies this review explicitly; see ER, 578). The review, signed by “D” (probably Evert Duyckinck), downplays popularity as a measure of literary value; according to Duyckinck, Hawthorne’s “merit does not need the verdict of the multitude to be allowed” (331). In a later passage which seems to have influenced Poe, the review comments upon Hawthorne’s “peculiar” genius: “The genius of Hawthorne is peculiar as that of Charles Lamb, with fewer external aids from books and conventional literary expressions. He does not, like the popular author, express the reluctant thoughts and images of other people’s minds, but calls the rest to look upon, wonder at, admire, and then love, his own. His writings, like those of all strictly original writers, are the solution of a new problem, the exhibition of the human heart and intellect, under a new array of circumstances” (332). In his 1847 review, Poe accepts the characterization of Hawthorne as a peculiar writer who does not “express the reluctant thoughts and images of other people’s minds.” (Poe’s phrasing is very close: he describes tales that elicit “the half-formed, the reluctant, or the unexpressed fancies of mankind” [ER, 582].) But whereas Duyckinck denigrates the reluctant thoughts of the multitude, Poe maintains that the writer who understands these buried yet common fantasies can more reliably produce the effect of originality, which for Poe is the only originality that matters. See “Nathaniel Hawthorne” [by “D”], Arcturus 1 (May 1841): 330–37. 40. Poe to White, 30 April 1835; Letters, 1:57–58. 41. In “MS. Found in a Bottle,” for example, the narrator reports just such an impulse: “To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions, predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. It is evident that we are hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge—some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction” (PT, 198). 42. ER, 686. For a similar passage, see “The Poetic Principle,” ER, 77. 43. See, for example, ER, 119. 44. “Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul.” The line is also alluded to in “Metzengerstein,” where the narrator, in a bit of questionable reasoning, identifies the inability to be alone as the cause of popular skepticism toward metempsychosis. 45. The means of production (department I) comprise “commodities that possess a form in which they either have to enter productive consumption, or at least can

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enter this.” Marx, Capital, Volume 2, intro. Ernest Mandel, trans. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 471. Raya Dunayevskaya offers an important gloss: “The division of the whole product into but two departments is not a hypothesis. . . . It must be so, for the use-values produced are not those used by workers, nor even by capitalists, but by capital.” See Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom (1958; New York: Morningside Books, 1988), 128. 46. Throughout, “determine” refers to factors which limit and exert pressures upon some activity; I do not mean predetermine. CHAPTER FIVE AVERAGE RACISM: POE, SLAVERY, AND THE WAGES OF LITERARY NATIONALISM

1. I am turning a phrase from Stephen Greenblatt, who writes, “I am not arguing that atheism was literally unthinkable in the late sixteenth century but rather that it was almost always thinkable only as the thought of another.” Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 22. 2. Neither Thompson nor Dayan, I hasten to add, is completely culpable for these mistakes. Thompson was making a quick point with a bit of hyperbole, and Dayan was basing her arguments on a persuasive but flawed article by Bernard Rosenthal (see note 6). In addition, both writers were prevented from qualifying or justifying their arguments in footnotes. For complete texts, see G. R. Thompson, “Poe and the Writers of the Old South,” Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 262–77; and Joan Dayan, “Romance and Race,” The Columbia History of the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 89–109. 3. Arthur Hobson Quinn, for example, sees the review as proof that Poe did take an interest in contemporary politics, and that his “knowledge of the actual conditions [of slavery] was much more accurate than that of Emerson or Whittier.” See Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1941), 249. In his influential piece on “Poe as a Social Critic,” Ernest Marchand gives a less tolerant account of Poe’s complicity with the Old South. Drawing heavily from the Drayton-Paulding essay, Marchand argues that Poe “brings to the defense of the South’s peculiar institutions the same rationalizations that issued from a thousand Southern pulpits every Sunday, and from a thousand Southern presses every day of the week for more than twenty years.” American Literature 6 (1934): 37. As John Carlos Rowe has observed, F. O. Matthiessen also relied on the Paulding-Drayton review for the chapter on Poe in the Literary History of the United States, ed. Robert E. Spiller et al. 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 321–27. See John Carlos Rowe, “Poe, Antebellum Slavery, and Modern Criticism,” in Poe’s Pym: Critical Explorations, ed. Richard Kopley (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 135. 4. Poe to Beverley Tucker, Letters, 1:90–91. The original is in the Tucker-Coleman collection. 5. Vincent Freimarck and Bernard Rosenthal, eds., Race and the American Romantics (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 3. Rosenthal selected and introduced the material on Poe.

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6. Bernard Rosenthal, “Poe, Slavery, and the Southern Literary Messenger: A Reexamination,” Poe Studies 7 (December 1974): 29–38. 7. Kenneth Alan Hovey, “Critical Provincialism: Poe’s Poetic Principle in Antebellum Context,” American Quarterly 39 (fall 1987): 347, 353 n. 40. 8. When space limitations required a change in the title of a piece by Lucian Minor, Poe took pains to explain why the alteration was necessary, and when ideological limitations required changes in a different essay by Minor, Poe sought prior approval. See the 5 February 1836 letter to Lucian Minor, Letters, 1:83. The piece requiring a shorter title was finally called “Selection in Reading.” The article condensed for ideological reasons was “Liberian Literature,” which Poe and T. W. White thought might offend the readers of the Southern Literary Messenger because it lauded the literary accomplishment of blacks. Referring to the deletions, Poe writes that “We availed ourselves of your consent to do so.” The young editor was even more solicitous when seeking to amend the title of an essay by Matthew Carey. After begging Carey’s consent, Poe gives five reasons for the change and then concludes, “I submit all, however, to your better judgment, merely saying that Mr. White would take it as a personal favor if you would allow us to make the alteration proposed” (Letters, 1:98). 9. A. Robert Lee, “ ‘Impudent and ingenious fiction’: Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,” in Edgar Allan Poe: The Design of Order (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1987), 128. For further speculations on Poe’s racial fears, see Louis D. Rubin, Jr., The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989). 10. Craig Werner, “The Insurrection of Subjugated Knowledge: Poe and Ishmael Reed,” in Poe and Our Times: Influences and Affinities, ed. Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV (Baltimore: The Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1986), 155. 11. Cited in Race and the American Romantics, 30. Tucker makes a similar argument in an 1844 essay for the Messenger, providing further evidence that he is in fact the author of the Drayton-Paulding review. Contrasting the different course of paternalism in Europe and the United States, Tucker argues that “the bond of sympathy that once connected the landed proprietor with all who lived upon his land is severed, while a like sympathy has been engendered between the white man and his negro slave.” See “On the Moral and Political Effect of the Relation between the Caucasian Master and the African Slave,” Southern Literary Messenger 10 ( June 1844): 333. 12. As a corollary, those who know something about Tucker—generally historians and biographers—attribute the review to Tucker without reservation. Significantly, if one merely admits the possibility of Tucker’s authorship, one starts to discover numerous weaknesses in Rosenthal’s argument. Space prevents a comprehensive list, but I would like to mention one curious example concerning the politics of Alphonse de Lamartine. A long passage from Lamartine is quoted in The South Vindicated to illustrate the permanence of racial differences; this same passage is approvingly quoted in the Paulding-Drayton review. Rosenthal sees this as further proof of Poe’s authorship: “Another aspect of the essay that suggests Poe’s hand concerns the extensive quotation of Lamartine to emphasize a pro-slavery position. As all of Poe’s literate contemporaries knew, Lamartine was one of Europe’s best known abolitionists. The writer of the review makes no allusion to this. Rather, he deliberately ignores the point. There is something perverse about using Lamartine this way, something tricky, the kind of play we associ-

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ate with the mischievousness of Poe rather than the sobriety of Tucker” (“Reexamination,” 34). Several important points are obscured by Rosenthal’s broad assertions concerning the knowledge and intent of an anonymous author. First, the passage from Lamartine is lifted verbatim out of The South Vindicated (228), so the reviewer may not be as tricky as Rosenthal supposes. Second, Tucker viewed Lamartine’s politics as being inconsistent, and as late as 1849 he was still trying to claim Lamartine for the conservative cause. In a review of Macaulay, Tucker attempts to identify the political positions of a number of political theorists, including Lamartine: “We believe that no discoveries of importance have been made since [the French Revolution] in morals or in politics. Like Lord Halifax, we are conservatives and republicans; and we are conservative because we are republican. This may seem a paradox to Mr. Hume or Mr. Roebuck. Mr. Macaulay will understand it. Lamartine understood it once, until he got his head turned, and it is probable he now understands it again.” Rosenthal is therefore incorrect in asserting that “all of Poe’s literate contemporaries” shared the same opinion of Lamartine’s politics. The reference to political vacillation further suggests that Tucker had previously relied on Lamartine to support some conservative position—most likely the conservative position articulated in the Paulding-Drayton review. In short, a more thorough investigation of sources reveals that much of Rosenthal’s evidence actually supports the case for Tucker’s authorship. 13. Dana D. Nelson, The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature, 1638–1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 91. 14. The use of the editorial voice explains why the author of the Paulding-Drayton review refers to Thomas Dew as a “correspondent” rather than a colleague. For a more detailed account of the magazine, see David K. Jackson, Poe and the Southern Literary Messenger (Richmond: Dietz Press, 1934). Recent evidence indicates that Tucker may have had much more to do with the Messenger than previously suspected. A newly discovered letter reveals that, in addition to all of his other contributions, Tucker also wrote anonymous short pieces or filler for the Messenger; his anecdote in the February 1836 issue entitled “Gibbon and Fox” had been erroneously attributed to Poe. See my “Correcting the Poe Canon: Beverley Tucker’s Anecdote on Gibbon and Fox,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 48.1 ( June 1993): 89–92. Rosenthal argues that Tucker “had very little to do with the Messenger during Poe’s reign, even as a contributor” (“Reexamination,” 35), but the date of publication for “Gibbon and Fox” (February 1836) suggests otherwise. If we count the Paulding-Drayton review, Tucker contributed to the January, February, April, and May issues of the Messenger. Based on internal evidence, it is also possible that Tucker wrote an essay on “The Classics” for the March 1836 issue of the Messenger (221–36). 15. Tucker to Duff Green, 20 April 1836, Duff Green Papers, Library of Congress. Typescript in Noma Lee Goodwin, “The Published Works of Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, 1784–1851,” unpublished M.A. Thesis, Duke University, 1947, 212–15. 16. This conjunction of factors explains many inconsistencies noted by Rosenthal. On Poe’s possible ideological motives for altering the review, see the account of Lucian Minor’s “Liberian Literature” below. 17. For sickbed scenes, compare “Slavery” (338) and “Blackstone” (230); on animal metaphors, compare “Slavery” (338) and The Partisan Leader (156); on northern

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meddling and southern defense, see “Slavery” (339) and “Blackstone” (228); on slavery as a positive good, see “Slavery” (339) and “Blackstone” (227); for appeals to Divine will, see “Slavery” (338) and “Effect” (330, 333); on the paradox of equality and difference, see “Slavery” (338) and “Effect” (330). 18. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, The Partisan Leader, ed. Carl Bridenbaugh (1836; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933), v. Further references are to this edition. 19. Review of “The South-West. By a Yankee,” Southern Literary Messenger 2 ( January 1836): 122. 20. Tucker, “An Essay on the Moral and Political Effect of the Relation between the Caucasian Master and the African Slave,” Southern Literary Messenger 10 ( June 1844): 332. 21. For more evidence, consult the entire passage in The Partisan Leader, 142. 22. Partisan Leader, 96. The Partisan Leader was set in 1849, which accounts for the disparity in the dating of “the revolution in public sentiment.” Further similarities in diction and sentiment can be found in Tucker’s “Lecture on Government,” published just one year later: “But, however we may cheer ourselves to our task, by indulging a hope that mankind, made wise by repeated error, may at last detect the great arcanum on which the adaptation of government to its proper objects depends, the fulfillment of that hope is hardly to be expected in our day. The history of the world shows us all nations, that have ever tasted of liberty, passing through the same appointed cycle, and, at longer or shorter periods, returning to the same points.” See Tucker, “A Lecture on Government,” Southern Literary Messenger 3 (April 1837): 213. 23. Tucker, “The Nature and Function of the Commercial Profession,” 410. Tucker makes similar claims in “The Present State of Europe.” There, he notes that “First and last, property is the real object of controversy in strife between the orders of society” (285); and that “Property, then, of old, as now, was at the bottom of all the revolutionary movements of England” (286). 24. Tucker, Review of “An Oration on the Life and Character of Gilbert Motier de Lafayette” by John Quincy Adams and “Eulogy on La Fayette” by Edward Everett, Southern Literary Messenger 1 (February 1835): 309. 25. Tucker, “Note to Blackstone’s Commentaries,” Southern Literary Messenger 1 ( January 1835): 228. 26. Tucker, “Bulwer’s New Play,” Southern Literary Messenger 3 ( January 1837): 92. 27. Tucker, “A Discourse on the Genius of the Federative System of the United States,” Southern Literary Messenger 4 (December 1838): 768. 28. “The March of Mind,” signed “V.” (Lynchburg, 30 October 1834), Southern Literary Messenger 1 (December 1834): 154–56. This connection is also noted by J. V. Ridgely in “The Authorship of the ‘Paulding-Drayton Review,’ ” Poe Studies Association Newsletter 20.2 (fall 1992): 2. 29. Tucker, Review of A History of the United States by George Bancroft, Southern Literary Messenger 1 ( June 1835): 587. 30. Tucker, review of “An Oration, delivered before the two Societies of the South Carolina College,” Southern Quarterly Review 17 (April 1850): 44 [37–48]. 31. Tucker, “The Present State of Europe,” Southern Quarterly Review 16.32 ( January 1850): 294 [277–323]. The phrase appears in two other places in this review (279, 286). In his lecture “The Nature and Function of the Commercial Profession,” he likewise refers to “that march of intellectual improvement, which is the boast of the age we

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live in.” See Tucker, A Series of Lectures on the Science of Government (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1845), 398. 32. Statistics are derived from the Lists of Payments for 1838 (the middle year of White’s proprietorship). These show the economic predominance of the South, but since White exchanged with other magazines, and since he canvassed the entire nation for new subscribers, many free copies of the Messenger were distributed in the North. See the announcement on the July 1838 cover: “A large distribution of the current volume of the Messenger, having been made in every part of the Union, as specimens of the work, the Editor is unable to furnish new subscribers with the entire volume” (“Wanted Immediately,” Southern Literary Messenger 4.7 [July 1838]: ii). In addition, White counted on Northern writers for copy and for favorable reviews. 33. J. S. Buckingham, The Slave States of America (London: Fisher, Son, & Co., 1842) vol. 2 (of 2 vols.), 545. Buckingham was predisposed to accept this claim; before recounting his steamer ride with “T. K. White” (sic), he had already described the literary scene in Richmond: “Its monthly periodical, The Southern Literary Messenger, contains as many well-written articles as any similar publication in England; and in my judgement, after a regular perusal of it for two years—as I subscribed to all the leading reviews and magazines during my stay in the country, or procured them, as published, through the booksellers—it is at least equal to any periodical, Northern or Southern, published in the United States” (522). 34. This version of the Prospectus appeared on the cover of the December 1838 Southern Literary Messenger. 35. For White’s desire to maintain full editorial control, see his 2 March 1835 letter to Lucian Minor, in David K. Jackson, “Some Unpublished Letters of T. W. White to Lucian Minor,” Tyler’s Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine 17 (April 1936): 227. For White’s wariness about political writing, see, in addition to the material below, White’s letter to Minor, 31 March 1840: “If I was to insert my personal, and at last my political, friends’ addresses, I should raise at once a hornet’s nest about my head and ears, that I should not soon get clear of.” Reprinted in Jackson, continuation of “Some Unpublished Letters of T. W. White to Lucian Minor,” Tyler’s Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine 18 ( July 1936): 48. 36. “Purgator,” Richmond Enquirer, 19 May 1835. 37. [Sparhawk?], Richmond Enquirer, 22 May 1835. 38. Lucian Minor, “Liberian Literature,” Southern Literary Messenger 2 (February 1836): 158. It is worth noting, in this context, that Lucian Minor had several (Southern) relatives who opposed slavery. Lucian Minor’s grandfather, Major John Minor of Topping Castle, had introduced a bill for the emancipation of slaves in the Virginia Legislature shortly after the Revolution. And Lucian’s cousin, Mary Berkeley Minor Blackford, denounced both slavery and secession. Between 1832 and 1866, she kept a journal called “Notes Illustrative of the Wrongs of Slavery.” See L. Minor Blackford, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 5, 46, & 263 n. 2. 39. See Larry Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 70–74. Colonization nevertheless enjoyed much support in Virginia. In the 1830s the Richmond Enquirer even printed notices of the local chapter’s weekly meetings. 40. 6 March 1836. Cited in Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson, Poe Log, 193. Poe called the Chronicle reviewer a “scoundrel,” and in a personal correspondence he

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assured Minor that his article on Liberian writing had been “lauded by all men of sense” (Letters, 1:88). 41. Southern Literary Messenger 1 ( January 1835): 254. 42. [A Virginian], “Remarks on a Note to Blackstone’s Commentaries, Vol. I, Page 423,” Southern Literary Messenger 1 (February 1835): 266. 43. Note to a review of The Partisan Leader, Southern Literary Messenger 3 ( January 1837): 73. 44. White to Tucker, 31 January 1837, Box 46 of correspondence, the TuckerColeman Collection. During the next several weeks, the Enquirer actually ran several attacks on the novel; see the February 9, 16, and 25 issues. The attacks centered on the opposition to Van Buren in the novel and the review, on the dangerous resurrection of nullification, and on the Messenger’s meddling in partisan political affairs. (Henry Tucker was probably most upset about nullification.) None of the attacks makes any direct reference to slavery. 45. In the 1840s and especially in the 1850s, the Messenger published many more articles defending the South against Northern “fanaticism.” This trend commenced during the last years of White’s editorship. The change in White’s editorial policy is signaled in the opening article of Volume Five; see “To Our Friends and Subscribers,” Southern Literary Messenger 5 ( January 1839): 1–2. 46. Richmond Enquirer, 22 May 1835. 47. Poe, “Editorial: Right of Instruction,” Southern Literary Messenger 2 ( June 1836): 445. 48. Poe, review of Memoirs of an American Lady by Mrs. Grant, Southern Literary Messenger 2 ( July 1836): 511. 49. Joseph Holt Ingraham, The South-West. By a Yankee, 2 vols. (1835; New York: Harper and Brothers; Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1966), 1:190–91. Like Grant, Ingraham apologizes for slavery without advocating it: “Do not mistake me: I am no advocate for slavery; but neither am I a believer in that wild Garrisonian theory, which, like a Magician’s wand, is at once to dissolve every link that binds the slave to his master, and demolish at one blow a system that has existed, still gaining in extent and stability, for centuries” (2:33). 50. Poe, review of Joseph H. Ingraham’s The South-West. By a Yankee. Southern Literary Messenger 2 ( January 1836): 122. The next sentence suggests that Poe had read (though he did not review) Paulding’s Slavery in the United States: “Indeed, we strongly agree with a distinguished Northern contemporary and friend, that the Professor’s strict honesty, impartiality, and unprejudiced common sense, on the trying subject which has so long agitated our community, is the distinguishing and the most praiseworthy feature of his book.” Paulding—the Northern contemporary and friend—quotes extensively from Ingraham. The longest excerpt (Slavery in the United States, 221–26) is immediately followed by a passage discussing the “galling bonds” of slavery (227), which probably inspired Poe’s phrase about “the moral galling of his chain.” In another passage echoed by Poe, Paulding refers to “Professor Ingraham” as “the candid and intelligent author of ‘The South West’ ” (293). Poe’s reference to “galling chains,” it should be noted, puts him more in line with those who depicted slavery as a necessary evil than those—Tucker included—who defended slavery as a positive good. 51. Poe, review of the North American Review, Southern Literary Messenger 2 (December 1835): 59.

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52. “Cuffies” is the common transliteration of the African name; it was a common practice to name children after days of the week. See Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Norton, 1975); Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 301 n. 26; and David DeCamp, “African Day-Names in Jamaica,” Language 43 (1967): 139–49. My thanks to Ted Pearson and Kathy Brown for this information. 53. “Romance and Race,” 96. Dayan insinuates that Poe is guilty by association. She does not, of course, insinuate that Poe was an abolitionist because he corresponded with Lowell and Longfellow, or because he favorably reviewed the work of Lydia Maria Child. In addition, Dayan identifies Dew as author of Vindication of Perpetual Slavery, a book that—if one by that title even exists—no one else attributes to Dew. Dew actually wrote an essay called “Abolition of Negro Slavery,” American Quarterly Review 12 (1832): 189–265; this was later expanded and published by Thomas W. White as the Review of the Debate in the Virginia legislature of 1831–1832 (Richmond: T. W. White, 1832), and subsequently reprinted many times, most notably in a collection called The Pro-slavery Argument (Charleston: Walker, Richards, & Co., 1852). 54. Rowe, “Poe, Antebellum Slavery, and Modern Criticism,” 119–20; Nelson, The Word in Black and White, 91; Rosenthal, “Reexamination,” 30. 55. Rosenthal continues the guilt-by-association argument when he identifies Poe with the brief extract of Dew’s address that appeared in the October 1836 Messenger. Rosenthal fails to mention that Poe breaks off the extract in mid-sentence and thereby avoids printing a more explicit statement on slavery. In the three sentences following the extract (not quoted by Poe), Dew calls upon students to defend the slave South: “I hope—yes, I know, that at this moment a worthier and a nobler impulse actuates every one of you. And you must recollect too, that you are generally members of that portion of our confederacy whose domestic institutions have been called in question by the meddling spirit of the age. You are slaveholders, or the sons of slaveholders, and as such your duties and responsibilities are greatly increased.” Thomas R. Dew, “An Address,” Southern Literary Messenger 2 (November 1836): 765. 56. See Rosenthal, “Reexamination,” 30; and Nelson, The Word in Black and White, 91. 57. John L. Carey, Some Thoughts Concerning Domestic Slavery, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Joseph N. Lewis, 1838), 99. George McDuffie had declared in 1835 that slavery was “the cornerstone of our republican edifice.” See Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 100. 58. A Virginian [psued.], Slavery in Maryland: An Anti-Slavery Review (Baltimore: Saturday Visiter Establishment, 1846), 20–21. 59. [Heath?], Slavery in Maryland: An Anti-Slavery Review, 4. 60. J. E. Snodgrass to Maria Weston Chapman, 25 November 1846. Boston Public Library, Ms.A.9.2.22, p. 134. See also Snodgrass to Chapman, 17 March 1846, Ms.A.9.2.22, p. 31. Some of the money donated by Chapman was used to pay for Slavery in Maryland: An Anti-Slavery Review. 61. Dwight R. Thomas, Poe in Philadelphia, 1838–1844: A Documentary Record, diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1978 (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1978; 7816395), 635, see also 896–899; Jane Swisshelm, Half A Century, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg & Co., 1880; rpt. New York: Source Book Press, 1970), 132. Significantly, Snodgrass persisted

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in his antislavery activism into the next decade. In 1852, for example, Snodgrass ran as an elector at large (Maryland) for the ill-fated Free Soil presidential ticket of John P. Hale and George W. Julian. See the “Free Democratic” handbill reprinted in Roger Burns and William Fraley, “ ‘Old Gunny’: Abolitionist in a Slave City,” Maryland Historical Magazine 68.4 (winter 1973): 370. 62. Broadway Journal 1 (March 22, 1845): 183. 63. R.C. (Robert Carter), “The Broadway Journal,” Boston Liberator, 28 March 1845. 64. Briggs to Lowell, 22 January 1845; quoted in Bette S. Weidman, “The Broadway Journal (2): A Casualty of Abolition Politics,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 73 (February 1969): 106. 65. Briggs to Lowell, 22 January 1845; quoted in Weidman (“The Broadway Journal,” 107). The line about doing “good by stealth” comes from Alexander Pope, Imitations of Horace, “Epilogue to the Satires,” Dialogue I, line 135. 66. Briggs to Lowell, 19 March 1845 and 10 April 1845; quoted in Weidman, “The Broadway Journal,” 108, 110. 67. See ER, 671–777. This crusade was in keeping with Poe’s earliest criticism, and it may also have been a deliberate strategy to arouse interest in the magazine and especially in his forthcoming book. Briggs’s letters seem to indicate that Poe convinced him that it would sell magazines. 68. Broadway Journal 1 (5 April 1845): 210; rpt. in Pollin, ed., Collected Writings, 3:71. 69. Broadway Journal 2 (26 July 1845): 41; Pollin, ed., Collected Writings, 3:183. In a section of the letter dealing with slavery and the Bible, Hammond remarks: “On the contrary, regarding slavery as an established, as well as inevitable condition of the human society, [Christ and the Apostles] never hinted at such a thing as its termination on earth.” Reprinted in The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860, ed. Drew Gilpin Faust (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 174. 70. For a more conservative estimate of Poe’s contribution to the review, see Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson, Poe Log, 529. 71. “The Aristidean,” Broadway Journal 1 (3 May 1845): 285. 72. Kenneth Silverman speculates that English may be the author of the phrase because he spoke derogatorily of blacks on other occasions. See Silverman, Edgar A. Poe, 254, 491. To my ear, however, the alliterative slur sounds like the work of Poe, and the rest of the review seems perfectly consistent with Poe’s other critical writings. 73. Poe’s review of The Linwoods appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger 1 (December 1835): 57–59; rpt. in Complete Works, 8:94–101. His review of Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger 2 (September 1836): 662–67; rpt. in ER, 389–403. Both of these reviews are discussed more extensively in the next chapter. 74. Thompson argues that Poe lacked the “regionalist sentiment” of other Southern writers (“Poe and the Writers of the Old South,” 268–69). Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was of course a phenomenal success, but a Boston publisher, accepting the logic of political and regional neutrality, turned it down because “it would not sell in the South” (William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America 1800–1870, 301). 75. Kun Jong Lee, “Ellison’s Invisible Man: Emersonianism Revisited,” PMLA 107

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(March 1992): 331–44. Lee disputes Philip Nicoloff’s characterization of Emerson as “a relatively mild racist” (Nicoloff, Emerson on Race and History, 124; quoted in Lee, 334). 76. Lee, “Ellison’s Invisible Man: Emersonianism Revisited,” 334. In Emerson’s defense, it should be noted that many of these statements appear to be fragmentary or even experimental. In addition, Lee sometimes quotes Emerson totally out of context, as with an entry concerning the fate of blacks to “serve & be sold & terminated” (Lee, 334). The rest of the passage—omitted by Lee—argues for the opposite position: “But if the black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new & coming civilization, for the sake of that element no wrong nor strength nor circumstance can hurt him, he will survive & play his part. So now it seems to me that the arrival of such men as Toussaint if he is pure blood, or of Douglas (sic) if he is pure blood, outweighs all the English & American humanity. . . . Here is the Anti-Slave. Here is Man; & if you have man, black or white is an insignificance. Why at night all men are black.” See The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph H. Orth and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 9:125. In my view Lee also unfairly belittles the antislavery efforts of Lydia Maria Child (343, n. 7). This condemnation of Child makes use of the evidence, though not the complete argument, of George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 37. 77. The advice about Poe “lowering himself” comes from Paulding to T. W. White, 3 March 1836; rpt. in George E. Woodberry, The Life of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), 156–60. Harper & Brothers June 1836 letter to Poe is reproduced in Arthur H. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography, 250–51. 78. Consider, for example, the comments of black historian and novelist William Wells Brown: “History shows that of all races, the African was best adapted to be the ‘hewers of wood, and drawers of water.’ Sympathetic in his nature, thoughtless in his feelings, both alimentativeness and amativeness large, the negro is better adapted to follow than to lead. His wants easily supplied, generous to a fault, large fund of humor, brimful of music, he has ever been found the best and most accommodating of servants.” See Brown’s My Southern Home (1880), in From Fugitive Slave to Free Man: The Autobiographies of William Wells Brown, ed. William L. Andrews (New York: Penguin, 1993), 179. Brown is also the author of the important antislavery novel Clotel (1853). 79. On Jupiter’s use of Gullah, see Marc Shell, Money, Language and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 5–23. 80. See, for example, Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 58. 81. Thomas R. Dew, “An Address on the Influence of the Federative Republican System of Government upon Literature and the Development of Character,” Southern Literary Messenger 2 (March 1836): 267. 82. Poe’s memory may have been jogged by a recent account of the life and works of Matthew Gregory Lewis (“ ‘Monk’ Lewis,” Southern Literary Messenger 15 [April 1849]: 230–35). This article, however, says nothing about the black servants in The Castle Spectre. In addition, Poe may have known that his mother, Eliza Poe, played the part of Angela in The Castle Spectre on 18 August 1810 in Richmond. See J. H. Whitty, “Memoir,” The Complete Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, xx.

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83. Matthew Gregory Lewis, “To The Reader,” The Castle Spectre (London: Joseph Bell, 1798), 101–2. 84. Though readers do not respond uniformly in reality, the assumption of a uniform or at least average response necessarily informs most attempts to appeal to the widest possible audience. Wordsworth effectively acknowledged that as a dramatist, Monk Lewis was more adept than he at anticipating the average response. After seeing a performance of The Castle Spectre, Wordsworth equivocally noted that the play “fitted the taste of the audience like a glove.” Quoted in Louis F. Peck, A Life of Matthew G. Lewis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 75. 85. John Carlos Rowe, for example, accuses Poe critics of repressing “the subtle complicity of literary Modernism with racist ideology,” and Dana Nelson complains of “the recent trend to sweep Poe’s politics under the rug” (Rowe, 136; Nelson, The Word in Black and White, 91). Curiously, Rowe himself is one of the critics Nelson accuses of depoliticizing Poe, although she bases her argument on Through the Custom House, published ten years before “Poe, Antebellum Slavery, and Modern Criticism.” 86. In the case of “Southern” literature, this approach often combines contradictory assumptions about free will and determinism, or about the unfettered romantic artist and the poor-devil writer imprisoned by history. In other words, Poe is racist because all southerners are racist, but he is damnable because he freely chose to be a racist. CHAPTER SIX SUBTLE BARBARIANS: THE SOUTHERN VOYAGE OF EDGAR ALLAN POE

1. PT, 162. For convenience, further citations will be taken from this edition. The Reynolds epigram (originally from Rep. 209, 1st ses. 20th Cong.) can be found in his collection of documents called Pacific and Indian Oceans: or, the South Sea Surveying and Exploring Expedition (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1841), 259. The 1838 Poe quotation is from PT, 1149–50. The 1849 epigram comes from Poe’s review of Lowell’s A Fable for Critics, rpt. in ER, 819–20. 2. The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 41. 3. As Harold Beaver indicates, virtually all of Chapter 16 of Pym is lifted verbatim from Reynolds’s 1836 address to Congress (referred to below). See The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, ed. Harold Beaver (London: Penguin, 1975), 260. In the note which concludes Pym, Poe further mentions that “the statements of the author in regard to these [southern] regions may shortly be verified or contradicted by means of the governmental expedition now preparing for the Southern Ocean” (PT, 1180). 4. See Chapter Five, above. 5. Douglas Robinson, “Reading Poe’s Novel: A Speculative Review of Pym Criticism, 1950–1980,” Poe Studies 15.1 ( June 1982): 47. 6. Jacques Derrida, “The Purveyor of Truth,” trans. Alan Bass, in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading, ed. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 179. 7. Jean Ricardou, “The Singular Character of the Water,” trans. Frank Towne, Poe Studies 9.1 ( June 1976): 4. 8. John Carlos Rowe, “Writing and Truth in Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Glyph 2 (1977): 112.

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9. John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 228. 10. Carolyn Porter, “Social Discourse and Nonfictional Prose,” in the Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 362. 11. From the ample criticism on travel narratives, I would like to single out an essay by Mary Louise Pratt, “Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen,” from “Race,” Writing and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 138–62. Pratt’s account of European expeditions into Africa provides many significant parallels to the following discussion of race, travel writing, and American imperialism. (Though space prevents an adequate exposition of her thesis, I shall discuss some of the more pertinent issues below.) For an excellent treatment of American texts, see William E. Lenz, “Narratives of Exploration, Sea Fiction, Mariners’ Chronicles, and the Rise of American Nationalism: ‘To Cast Anchor on that Point Where All Meridians Terminate,’ ” American Studies 32 (fall 1991): 41–61. 12. Famous for his many projects to “improve the common stock of knowledge,” Franklin even fixed his practical gaze on ultimate things. In his Autobiography, for example, he describes how he turned against Deism when he “began to suspect that this Doctrine tho’ it might be true, was not very useful.” The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 114. See also J. Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur, Sketches of Eighteenth Century America, ed. Henri L. Bourdin et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925), 66–67. 13. Quoted in Pollin, ed., Collected Writings, vol. 1, 373. 14. Robert R. Almy, “J. N. Reynolds: A Brief Biography with Particular Reference to Poe and Symmes,” The Colophon ns 2.2 (winter 1937): 228. 15. [James McBride?], Symmes’s Theory of Concentric Spheres; Demonstrating that the Earth is Hollow, habitable within, and widely open about the poles (Cincinnati: Morgan, Lodge and Fisher, 1826), 56. Italics in original. The copy in the Library Company of Philadelphia bears the following inscription: “Received from J. N. Reynolds. New York. 1826. [signed] Wm. W. Chew.” This provides further evidence of Reynolds’s early advocacy of Symmes’s theory. “Dr. Mitchell” may be John Mitchell (1680?–1750?), physician, cartographer, and author of such works as the Map of the British and French Dominions in North America and an Essay on the Causes of the Different Colors of People in Different Climates. 16. Reynolds addressed Congress on 2 April 1836. Poe quoted sections of the address in the January 1837 Southern Literary Messenger; see ER, 1242. 17. Review of Voyage of the U. S. Frigate Potomac, Southern Literary Messenger 1 ( June 1835): 594. The reviewer apparently approved of Reynolds’s transformation, for at the end of the review he remarks that Reynolds “writes well, although somewhat too enthusiastically, and his book will gain him reputation as a man of science and accurate observation” (595). There is some dispute over the authorship of this review, but it is likely that Poe was at least familiar with it. 18. Cf. Letters, 1:154, 172, 205. On 4 July 1841 he wrote his friend Frederick W. Thomas, “To coin one’s brain into silver, at the nod of a master, is to my thinking, the hardest task in the world” (Letters, 1:172).

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19. Hamer’s speech, delivered to the House of Representatives on 9 May 1836, is reprinted in J. N. Reynolds, Pacific and Indian Oceans, 281. 20. Jefferson to George Rogers Clark, 4 December 1783. Printed in Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 783. 21. Jefferson, “Instructions to Captain Lewis,” 20 June 1803, printed in Writings, 1128. Poe refers extensively to “Mr. Jefferson’s exploring project” in the first chapter of The Journal of Julius Rodman (PT, 1187–96). 22. Reynolds said that Jefferson “has left us a model worthy of all imitation. . . . Among all the records of his genius, his patriotism, and his learning, this paper deserves to take, and in time will take rank, second only to the Declaration of Independence.” Poe reprinted this portion of Reynolds’s “Address” in the January 1837 Southern Literary Messenger. See ER, 1246. 23. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York: Norton, 1967), 12. 24. Benjamin Morrell, A Narrative of Four Voyages (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1832), xi–xii. 25. See Pollin, ed., The Imaginary Voyages, vol. 1 of Collected Writings 583 n. 1.1F. 26. Jeremiah N. Reynolds’s Voyage of the United States Frigate Potomac (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835), ii. Paradoxically, then, what Raymond Williams describes as the romantic protest against capitalism was often converted into an instrument for economic development. 27. Tucker to White, 29 November 1835; quoted in George E. Woodberry, The Life of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), 151–53. Poe wrote back to Tucker almost immediately: “Your opinion of ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’ is just. The Tale was written some years ago, and was one among the first I ever wrote. . . . I mention this to account for the ‘mere physique’ of the horrible which prevails in the [story]. I do not think I would be guilty of a similar absurdity now” (Letters, 1:77–78). 28. Unlike “MS. Found in a Bottle,” the missing knowledge at the end of Pym is not transcendent but simply undifferentiated. That is to say, at the end Poe hasn’t chosen between fiction and fact, between religion and science, or between the sublime and the bottom line. Nor has he attempted any kind of epistemological synthesis (as he does in Eureka). The inability to choose a dominant form of knowledge, I would suggest, prevents Pym from achieving closure in any conventional sense. 29. The advice about Poe “lowering himself” comes from Paulding to T. W. White, 3 March 1836. White shared this letter with Poe. “A Tale in a couple of volumes” is discussed in a letter from Paulding to Poe, 17 March 1836. Both letters are reprinted inWoodberry, Life of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 1, 156–60. Harper & Brothers June 1836 letter to Poe is reproduced in Arthur H. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography, 250–51. 30. Joseph V. Ridgely, “The Growth of the Text,” in Pollin, ed., Collected Writings, vol. 3, 29–36. 31. Exman, The Brothers Harper, 30. According to Exman, another narrative of the journey, supposedly composed by Morrell’s wife for female readers, was also ghostwritten (by a Colonel Samuel L. Knapp). Advertisements for Abbey Jane Morrell’s Narrative of a Voyage suggested that her account, “divested of nautical technicalities and descriptions purely maritime, will be read with pleasure, especially by readers of her own sex and country.”

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32. In addition to the introductory sections of The Imaginary Voyages, see Pollin’s “The Narrative of Benjamin Morrell: Out of ‘The Bucket’ and into Poe’s Pym,” Studies in American Fiction 4 (autumn 1976): 157–72. 33. These reviews, attributed to the New York Weekly Messenger and the Christian Advocate and Journal, are taken from a June 1835 advertisement for “Voyages, Travels, &c.” at the back of Jeremiah N. Reynolds’s Voyage of the United States Frigate Potomac (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835). 34. Quoted in William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (1961; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 239. 35. Slavery in the United States (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1836), 71. Paulding quotes Park extensively; see especially pages 229–47. 36. Paulding to Charles Wilkes, 11 August 1838, from Aderman, ed., The Letters of James Kirke Paulding, 227. 37. Among the competing forms of knowledge in Pym are geology, theology, political economy, phrenology, and the science of race. Symmes’s theory of the hollow earth is also put to the test. 38. David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 243. 39. It is against this second, emergent view that writers of the American Renaissance fought a long and losing battle. Cf. the words of Ishmael: “And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do the hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way.” Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, 358. 40. Address, as printed in Pacific and Indian Oceans, 31. It is not known whether Reynolds actually reached “those whose duty it is to investigate and decide on all matters of national concern.” Reynolds did speak in the halls of Congress, but he did so on a Saturday evening. 41. David and Charles Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and its Tributaries; and of the Discovery of the Lakes of Shirwa and Nyassa, 1858–1864 (New York, 1866), 2; quoted in Mary Louise Pratt, “Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen,” 144. 42. John Hanning Speke, What Led to the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (Edinburgh, 1864), 307; quoted in Pratt, “Scratches on the Face of the Country,” 145. 43. For an analysis of Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, see Pratt, “Scratches on the Face of the Country,” 150–52. 44. PT, 1007. In his review of Pym, William Burton claimed that “A more impudent attempt at humbugging the public has never been exercised.” See I. M. Walker, Edgar Allan Poe: The Critical Heritage (New York: Routledge, 1986), 96. 45. Warner, The Letters of the Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 116. Harry Levin, who was among the first to interpret the racial implications of Pym, detects a similar ambiguity. See Levin, The Power of Blackness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), 122–23. 46. See Ridgely’s description of the composition of Pym in Pollin, ed., The Imaginary Voyages, 29–36. 47. See Pollin, ed., The Imaginary Voyages, 361 n. 6A. Significantly, a letter by Charles Anthon (discussing expeditions as a means of conducting linguistic research) is printed in Reynolds, Pacific and Indian Oceans, 141.

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48. Charles Anthon, “Affiliation of Languages,” New-York Review 1 (March 1837): 132. 49. John Carlos Rowe, “Poe, Antebellum Slavery, and Modern Criticism,” 126. 50. “Affiliation of Languages,” 120. Anthon’s full statement is illuminating: “No idea is at the same time more simple in itself, and more productive of expressions, than that of Deity. Each nation, being unable either to understand the nature of the divine essence, or to express its perfection, has proceeded by a species of approximation, and indicated the characteristic which has struck it most forcibly. Thus, among the people of the south, God is splendor, light. The Sanskrit term for deity is derived, like the names for ‘heaven’ and ‘day,’ from the verb div, ‘to be brilliant.’ ” 51. See 1 Samuel 13:21. (It should be noted, however, that the word does not appear in the King James translation). According to archeological evidence, a pim was probably worth about two-thirds of a shekel. See the entries for “money,” “pim,” and “weights and measures” in the Dictionary of the Bible, ed. James Hastings, rev. by Frederick C. Grant and H. H. Rowley (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963). 52. PT, 1182. Compare this to the motto for The Stylus, Poe’s most serious effort to achieve material independence: “—unbending that all men / Of thy firm TRUTH may say—‘Lo! this is writ / With the antique iron pen’ ” (ER, 1033). 53. Harold Beaver, commentary to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 262. 54. “Poe’s Tsalal and the Virginia Springs,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 19 (March 1965): 399. As suggested in the previous note, Harold Beaver provides an analysis of the racial implications of Pym, aptly describing the water as “nature’s guide to apartheid” (262). However, he immediately qualifies his argument: “But if Poe is here indulging in his own allegory of the South, it is based as usual on curious scientific or archaeological phenomena” (262). Beaver then goes on to summarize Cecil’s findings on the relationship between the Tsalal stream and several fashionable (and ostensibly therapeutic) sulphur springs in Virginia. 55. Southern Literary Messenger 2 (February 1836): 180; also quoted in Cecil, “Poe’s Tsalal and the Virginia Springs,” 399. Poe specifically mentions a section in the Gazetteer containing a report by William B. Rogers, Director of the Virginia Geological Survey from 1835 to 1841. (Rogers was also Professor of Natural Philosophy and Chemistry at the College of William and Mary, the same institution where Beverley Tucker taught law and the morality of slavery.) In selecting quotations from the review, Cecil implies that Poe and Martin refer only to mineral resources, but as the subtitle indicates, Martin’s Gazetteer actually contains “a copious collection of Geographical, Statistical, Political, Commercial, Religious, Moral and Miscellaneous Information, collected and compiled from the most respectable, and chiefly from original sources” (180). 56. Poe even says that the veins of water reconstitute themselves “as with us,” though it is quite possible that he is talking about the way that human veins (especially near the surface of the skin) respond to the application and removal of obstructing pressure. 57. Southern Literary Messenger 2 (April 1836): 339; the quotation also appears on p. 228 of The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of the Northern Abolitionists (Philadelphia: H. Manly, 1836; rpt. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969). In Harrison’s The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, the Lamartine passage is omitted. Freimarck and Rosenthal restore the quotation in Race and the American Romantics. Poe,

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not incidentally, uses a similar figure—without the racial interpretation—in “How to Write a Blackwood Article.” In the tale, Dr. Moneypenny advises Zenobia about “piquant facts for similes.” One of the facts he mentions concerns the river Alpheus: “Again. ‘The river Alpheus passed beneath the sea, and emerged without injury to the purity of its waters.’ Rather stale that, to be sure, but, if properly dressed and dished up, will look quite as fresh as ever.” (PT, 284) In “A Predicament,” Zenobia does dress up this stale fact about pure water, renaming the river “Alfred” and drawing a similitude between it and her passage beneath the arch of a Gothic cathedral (PT, 290). 58. “Lamartine’s Jocelyn,” New York Review, No. 4 (April 1838): 342–43. Poe’s review of Stephens’s Incidents of Travel appeared in the preceding issue. 59. The importance of distinguishing between discursive and productive modes emerges most starkly in the case of Tsalal. Precisely where one would expect David Reynolds to offer some account of the conflict between the white explorers and black inhabitants, he instead discusses the various pseudo-sciences which inform Poe’s fiction. “It was in the strange ‘isms’ of his day,” claims Reynolds, “that Poe found scientific correlatives for the literary fusions he was attempting” (Beneath the American Renaissance, 243). These “isms” include mesmerism, spiritualism, and animal magnetism, but conspicuously absent from the list is any mention of racism, capitalism, or imperialism. Given the centrality of the struggle over slavery, and the function of exploration narratives in extending a certain mode of domestic production and a complementary program of imperialism, it is difficult to view the Tsalal episode as being unrelated to these other “isms.” 60. For an interesting discussion of regional differences over lying and honor, see Kenneth S. Greenberg, “The Nose, the Lie and the Duel in the Antebellum South,” The American Historical Review 95 (February 1990): 57–74. 61. In the Columbia Literary History of the United States, for example, G. R. Thompson mentions the misattribution, and then argues that a review of Lowell’s A Fable for Critics is “the only instance of Poe taking any kind of stand on the issue of slavery.” Though acknowledging Poe’s occasional support of Southern letters, Thompson claims that “with this single exception . . . Poe does not campaign for a Southern literature.” See “Edgar Allan Poe and the Writers of the Old South,” Columbia Literary History of the United States 269. As indicated below, Poe did lobby for a national literature and especially for a national literary market, but this should not be taken as yet another sign that Poe was unaffected by ideological struggles or that he was somehow distant from the fundamental antagonisms between North and South. 62. ER, 399. On Poe’s racism, two further points should be noted. First, given the enormous quantity of his writings, there are precious few references to slavery, and many of these are made in the context of a broader assault on a literary enemy who is “vulnerable” for having abolitionist tendencies (e.g., Longfellow). Second, although Poe often acts as a mere mouthpiece for the views of a southern aristocracy, he does not always take these views to heart, and he often seems willing to alter his beliefs when it might prove profitable. 63. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (New York: Anchor Books, 1973), 36. 64. James K. Paulding, Slavery in the United States, 184; William Drayton, The South Vindicated, 175; William Gilmore Simms, “Miss Martineau on Slavery,” Southern Literary Messenger 3 (November 1837): 641–57.

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65. Responding to these fears, Drayton confidently denies the possibility of collective action by slaves. According to him, “The blacks from their position can never effect organization. The police of the South effectually prevents [sic] it; and even should the police be relaxed, or withdrawn, the ignorance and stupidity of the blacks would preclude the possibility of extensive and effective combination” (The South Vindicated, 301). Obviously, the natives of Tsalal do not conform to this view. 66. Lucian Minor, “Liberian Literature,” Southern Literary Messenger 2 (February 1836): 158. 67. Letters, 1:83. As indicated above, Poe also deleted several passages from Beverley Tucker’s proslavery review article (April 1836), ostensibly “with a view of so condensing it as to get it in the space remaining at the end of the number.” See Letters, 1:90–91. 68. 6 March 1836; quoted in Poe Log, 193. 69. Rowe, paper delivered at the American Literature Convention (San Diego, June 1996); Dana Nelson, The Word in Black and White, 90–108. 70. Henry Louis Gates, Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 238. In the opinion of James Kirke Paulding, the “game of information giving” should also be avoided by slaveholders. According to Paulding, freemen and slaves stood in a different relation to knowledge: “Every increase of information, and every new expansion of mind, can be made subservient to the purposes of [the freeman’s] happiness; whereas with the slave, the effect is diametrically opposite, because the acquisition of all knowledge not essential to the performance of his duties produces discontent, which only makes his present situation less tolerable, while it does not open the least prospect of bettering it in future.” See Slavery in the United States, 184. 71. John Allan told William Galt, Jr., that he should never discuss politics: “You will recollect you are to have no Political Opinions, as you go to America as one of its foster Sons it is but right you should be neuter . . . the best is to let Politics alone altogether” (Poe Log, 33). It is likely that Allan gave similar advice to his own foster son. 72. Broadway Journal, 6 September 1845; rpt. in Collected Works, 3:242. 73. To White, 30 April 1835, Letters, 1:57. 74. Kinley J. Brauer, “The United States and British Imperial Expansion, 1815– 1860,” Diplomatic History 12 (Winter 1988): 19–37. J. Q. Adams is quoted by Brauer, 27; Henry Clay is quoted in Brauer, 24, 32. 75. See Reynolds, Pacific and Indian Oceans, 260; Voyage of the Potomac, 384. In other contexts, it should be recalled, Poe was perfectly willing to join the Anglo-phobic chorus. 76. Even the size of the figure is bad for business. In his Narrative of Four Voyages, for example, Morrell discusses the impact of explorers who claim that the far reaches of the earth are inhabited by a race of giants; such exaggerated reports, Morrell soberly warns, “have a tendency to deter investigation and commercial enterprise” (248). 77. Quoted in Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire (1973; Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 9. 78. Quoted in James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 115–16. 79. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 244. 80. J. Gerald Kennedy, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” and the Abyss of Interpretation (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), 62. 81. Narrative of Four Voyages, 287. On another occasion, Morrell discusses black

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and white as gradations rather that opposites. While visiting the fort at Port Praya (in the Cape Verde Islands), he is struck by the fact that the sentinels come in all shades of skin color. “They are of all possible complexions that a painter’s imagination can conceive, and if paraded according to shades, would furnish a practical illustration of the following paradoxical couplet: ‘Falsehood and truth, opposed like black and white, / By unperceived gradations may unite”’ (272). The couplet, of course, is singularly germane to Pym as well. CHAPTER SEVEN THE CODE FOR GOLD: POE AND CRYPTOGRAPHY

1. B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (New York: The Modern Library, 1969), 68. 2. Ellis and Allan to Robert Gwathmey, 25 January 1811. Collected in the letter book 1810–1815, container 521 of the Ellis-Allan Papers, Library of Congress. 3. In an 1837 review of Beverley Tucker’s novel George Balcombe, Poe corrects Tucker’s misunderstanding of how the theory of supply and demand might apply to human virtues (ER, 978). For examples of Poe’s political satire, see “The Man That Was Used Up” and “Some Words with a Mummy.” 4. Poe records this exchange in a balance sheet very much resembling the account books of Ellis & Allan. See Letters, 1:272. It is likely that Poe originally intended to include “The Gold-Bug” in the first issue of the Stylus, but then sold the story to Graham when his magazine venture was postponed. See Thomas Ollive Mabbott, ed., Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 3, Tales and Sketches, 1843–1849 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 803–4. In 1848 Poe suggested that Graham was not entirely pleased with the story: “ ‘The Gold-Bug’ was originally sent to Graham, but he not liking it, I got him to take some critical papers instead, and sent it to the Dollar Newspaper” (Letters, 2:356). 5. A copyright was entered on 23 June 1843, but many newspapers disregarded the copyright and reprinted the story without permission. See Mabbott, Collected Works, 3:804. 6. Poe to Frederick W. Thomas, 4 May 1845, Letters, 1:287. 7. See Edward C. Kirkland, A History of American Economic Life, 3rd ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951), 262–81. 8. Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), 104. 9. The Revolutionary Age of Andrew Jackson (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 123. See also Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics (rev. ed.; Homewood, IL: The Dorsey Press, 1978), 137–48; and Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion, 101–120. 10. Poe to Thomas Wyatt, 1 April 1841. Printed in Joseph J. Moldenhauer, “Beyond the Tamarind Tree: A New Poe Letter,” American Literature 42 ( January 1971): 469. On this same day Poe repeated the claim when he told Joseph Snodgrass that his magazine “would have appeared under glorious auspices, and with capital at command, in March, as advertised, but for the unexpected bank suspensions” (Letters, 1:157). 11. Poe to Biddle, 6 January 1841, in Letters, 2:694. 12. “What Is Money?” Madisonian, 14 December 1841, 3.

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13. John Tyler, Message to Congress, 7 December 1841. Quoted in [A. G. Abell], Life of John Tyler (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1843), 210. 14. According to Sylvan H. Kesilman, “there would be no true fiscal agency until 1913, when the Federal Reserve was created, bearing similarities to Tyler’s Exchequer plan.” See Kesilman, “John Tyler as President: An Old School Republican in Search of Vindication,” in The Moment of Decision: Biographical Essays on American Character and Regional Identity, ed. Randall M. Miller and John R. McKivigan (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 82. 15. See Clarence S. Brigham, Edgar Allan Poe’s Contributions to “Alexander’s Weekly Messenger,” 115. Incidentally, the next issue of Alexander’s Weekly Messenger contained a cipher from seventeen-year-old Schuyler Colfax, who would later serve as vice president of the United States (during Grant’s first term). 16. See Robert Seager, And Tyler Too: A Biography of John and Julia Gardiner Tyler (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 21. Julia Gardiner Tyler hired Frederick W. Thomas as her press agent in 1844 (Seager, 245). 17. Thomas to Poe, 30 August 1841; quoted in Dwight Thomas, “Poe in Philadelphia,” 256. In his letter to Poe, F. W. Thomas also included a note from Charles Frailey “on the matter of his [prior] communication,” which has not been recovered. 18. Enlisting the aid of Thomas as well as Robert Tyler, son of the president, Poe later sought a position in the Philadelphia Custom House, but his hopes for landing a patronage job were finally dashed in November 1842. Soon after this he composed or at least revised “The Gold-Bug.” 19. Why, then, did Poe not solve the W. B. Tyler cipher? There are many plausible explanations for this: the cipher printed in Graham’s contained too many errors; Poe left Graham’s in May 1842; Poe shifted his attention from a job in Washington (as official decoder?) to a job in the Philadelphia Custom House; when Poe did visit Washington he was too inebriated to carry out any ingenious designs; and Poe may simply have lost his nerve after discovering that his cryptographic feats could be duplicated by some Graham’s subscribers (such as Richard Bolton, who is discussed below). 20. “Governor John Tyler” appears on the List of Payments for the January 1839 issue. See Southern Literary Messenger 5 ( January 1839): iv (cover). 21. John Tyler, Message to Congress, 9 September 1841. Reprinted in Abell, Life of John Tyler, 201. 22. Tyler to W. F. Pendleton, 19 January 1833. Printed in Lyon G. Tyler, Letters and Times of the Tylers, 3 vols. (Richmond, VA: Whittet & Shepperson, 1884–96), 3:64. For the description of Cassius—assassin of Caesar—as “Ultimus Romanorum,” see Tacitus, Annals, 4.34. 23. Speaking against the so-called Force Bill, Tyler quoted Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “No, sir, I will not lend to aid to the passage of this bill. I had almost said that ‘I had rather be a dog and bay at the moon than such a Roman.’ ” Printed in Abell, Life of John Tyler, 146. Not incidentally, a young John Tyler once described Thomas Jefferson as a Brutus fighting against tyranny. See Lyon G. Tyler, Letters and Times of the Tylers, 3:19. The lines from Pope’s Essay on Man (IV.257) appear in Abell, Life of John Tyler, 172. 24. In his memoir of political life, Henry Wise quotes the same couplet from Pope mentioned above, but instead of focusing on Tyler as a Marcellus figure, Wise uses the last line of the couplet to characterize Clay as a Caesar “with a Senate at his

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heels.” See Wise, Seven Decades of the Union (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1881), 192, 230. 25. Speech of Henry Wise, 6 August 1841; quoted in Lyon G. Tyler, Letters and Times of the Tylers, 2:61. For further contemporary references to White as a Cato figure, see Nancy N. Scott, A Memoir of Hugh Lawson White (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1856), 396, 429, 435. 26. See Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 44–48. As Bailyn explains, the figure of Cato was used for a variety of purposes, ranging from the denunciation of political corruption to the advocacy of liberal ideas about natural rights, the contractual basis of government, freedom of the press, and England’s mixed constitution. 27. See “The Tariff,” Southern Quarterly Review 4 (October 1842): 434–35. 28. John Tomlin to Poe, 22 November 1840. Tomlin went on to note, “It is possible, that I may thro’ the Branch of the Union Bank at this place, obtain a check on some one of your Banks. If Virginia, N. Carolina or S. Carolina money is more current in Philadelphia, than Tennessee, I shall certainly obtain the one that you mention, as preferable.” See Complete Works, 17:61. 29. Tomlin to Poe, 30 April 1841; quoted in Poe Log, 324. 30. Poe to Frederick W. Thomas, 4 July 1841, in Letters, 1:171. Thomas had recently obtained a temporary appointment in the Treasury Department, and he encouraged Poe to seek a similar position. See Poe Log, 332. 31. Poe to Richard Bolton, 18 November 1841, in Letters, 1:188. Poe arrived at the figure of 100,000 readers by assuming that there were four readers for each of the 25,000 copies of Graham’s Magazine. 32. Poe to John Tomlin, 28 August 1843, in Letters, 1:235. Tomlin had sent a cipher by Alexander B. Meek for Poe to solve. Poe solved the cipher in his reply, and he also remarks that Meek “is mistaken in supposing that I ‘pride myself’ upon my solutions of ciphers. I feel little pride about anything” (Letters, 1:235–36). 33. “A Few Words on Secret Writing,” Graham’s Magazine, July 1841; rpt. in Complete Works, 14:114. Between July and December 1841, Poe wrote four articles on cryptography for Graham’s; the entire series is reprinted (with errors discussed below) in Complete Works, 14:114–49. 34. See Shawn Rosenheim, “ ‘The King of Secret Readers’: Edgar Poe, Cryptography, and the Origins of the Detective Story,” ELH 56 (summer 1989): 375–400; a revised version of this appears in Rosenheim, The Cryptographic Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 19–41. See also Louis Renza, “Poe’s Secret Autobiography,” in The American Renaissance Reconsidered: Selected Papers From the English Institute, 1982-1983, ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E. Pease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), n. 14, 86–87. In this note Renza remarks: “I am not sure that [Tyler] was not Poe himself, since in this letter ‘Tyler’ gives an example of a cipher whose solution/translation echoes one of Poe’s most frequently used refrains in his tales and poetry. . . . If Poe indeed adopts the alias of Tyler here, then we can also claim that he secretly but openly professes a theory of secret autobiographical writing in this letter.” 35. One of these, which the letter never reveals, is a method he has adopted for his own “private use” but which he would “prefer not giving here” (Complete Works, 14:142–43). This tantalizing refusal, it should be noted, echoes similar demurrals from

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the cryptography articles in Alexander’s Weekly Messenger. See Clarence S. Brigham, Edgar Allan Poe’s Contributions to “Alexander’s Weekly Messenger,” 39, 45. These refusals are discussed in greater detail below. 36. The symbols are defined by Zapf Dingbats. 37. In “The King of Secret Readers,” Rosenheim reprints the cryptograph, but the first three lines are mysteriously omitted (379), a mistake left uncorrected in succeeding issues of ELH. Perpetuating the mystery, The Cryptographic Imagination prints both the erroneous and the restored versions without comment (Figure 3, p. 23; Figure 4, p. 37). The Tyler letter is also reproduced in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (14:144), but readers should be aware that there is an error, hitherto unnoticed, in the standard edition of Poe’s works. In The Complete Works, line 5 of the cryptograph appears as follows: ✍¡¶[?(,;§‡☞‡]✝§§:(✝[✝[¶?‡]: Between the marked characters (“[” and “?”), the typesetter dropped three symbols from the original Graham’s text. The line should read: ✍¡¶[¡¶[?(,;§‡☞‡]✝§§:(✝[✝[¶?‡]: For convenience I have retained the line breaks from the standard edition. 38. Rosenheim sees a gothic motif in this: “Most tellingly, the ‘violated depository’ in which the billets-doux are kept recalls all the violated crypts of gothic romances, and we see that once more one of Poe’s fictive motifs—here, the return of the sister/bride from the grave—turns out, on examination, to be the narrative equivalent of a textual relation” (Cryptographic Imagination, 35). As argued above, however, the stolen-letter motif may have a more mundane genealogy. Poe wrote to Royster in 1826 while he was a student at the University of Virginia. She later recalled, “he wrote to me frequently, but my father intercepted the letters because we were too young—no other reason. . . . I was not aware that he wrote to me until I was married to Mr. Shelton” (Poe Log, 74). The marriage to Shelton took place in 1828; in 1836 she again saw Poe in Richmond, and it is likely that Poe then discovered that his letters had been stolen. 39. The valentine poem is dated 14 February 1846; for a facsimile see Josephine Poe January, “Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Child Wife’,” Century Magazine, ns 56 (October 1909): 894–96. Poe also composed a number of acrostic poems, including “Elizabeth,” “An Acrostic,” “Enigma,” “A Valentine to —— —— ——,” and “An Enigma.” 40. John A. Hodgson, “Decoding Poe? Poe, W. B. Tyler, and Cryptography,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 92 (October 1993): 523–34. I first decoded the Tyler cryptogram in my 1991 Duke dissertation; later I presented this information at the 1992 MLA Annual Convention in New York. Hodgson did not know this, so his own decoding of the Tyler cryptogram constitutes what is called, in the field of scientific research, an independent discovery. 41. See Mabbott, ed., Collected Works, vol. 2, 710. 42. At one point, for example, Tyler boasts of knowing a cryptographic method that is unrivaled in its simplicity and security, but then he declines to reveal it: “As I prefer not giving it here, I shall be compelled to have recourse to some other plan that is more complicated” (Complete Works, 14:143). 43. Key words and phrases, appearing in both Poe’s and W. B. Tyler’s writings on cryptography, include the following: “conversant”; “mystery”; “specimen”; “lock and key”; “unriddled”; “insoluble”; “hieroglyphic”; and “non plus.”

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44. In the December 1841 letter from Graham’s, W. B. Tyler seeks to avoid giving the impression that he is in any way challenging or belittling Poe’s cryptographic ability: “I wish to be distinctly understood; the secret communication above, and the one following, are not intended to show that you have promised more than you can perform. I do not take up the gauntlet” (Complete Works, 14:144). In the 26 February 1840 issue of Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, a writer now identified as Poe expressed similar sentiments in similar terms: “But we wish it distinctly understood that such puzzles as this are not what we promised to decypher. For what we did promise to do, we refer our friends to a late Messenger” (Brigham, Edgar Allan Poe’s Contributions, 90). 45. Oliver Perry Chitwood, John Tyler: Champion of the Old South (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), 146. For John Tyler’s letters to his children, see Lyon G. Tyler, Letters and Times of the Tylers, 1:427 & 1:547. According to John Hodgson, anomalies in the Cato cryptogram suggest that it was taken from an edition known as “The British Classics.” This is the same edition that John Tyler recommends to his daughter. See Letters and Times of the Tylers, 1:549. 46. “Eleonora” is the narration of a man who vows to his dying wife (Eleonora) that he will never leave their ancestral valley nor take another bride; Eleonora in turn promises to comfort and communicate with the narrator from beyond the grave. Eleonora dies; her spiritual presence is initially strong but fades over time; the narrator grows unhappy and leaves the valley; and ultimately he marries the mysterious Ermengarde. The voice of Eleonora returns but once to sanction this union, perhaps because her soul has transmigrated into Ermengarde’s body, or perhaps because earthly vows must finally yield to the heavenly “spirit of Love.” It is, in any event, a tale about communication between absent lovers, and insofar as it contemplates the triumph of soul over matter, “Eleonora” bears some resemblance to the encrypted soliloquy from Addison’s Cato. 47. Tyler prefaced the quotation with a disclaimer: “I may well exclaim with our talented but unfortunate Edgar A. Poe, without participating in the regret which the lines express.” He also misquoted the first two lines of the stanza, substituting “Alas! Alas! for me! / Ambition all is o’er;” in place of Poe’s “For, alas! alas! with me / The light of life is o’er!” See Lyon G. Tyler, Letters and Times of the Tylers, 1:467. 48. Bolton to Poe, 10 January 1842. First published in the Memphis Commercial Appeal 15 November 1925, sec. 4:7; rpt. in Dwight R. Thomas, “Poe in Philadelphia,” 309. 49. Brigham, Edgar Allan Poe’s Contributions to “Alexander’s Weekly Messenger,”, 37. Joseph Wood Krutch points out that Alexander’s Weekly Messenger “was exceedingly obscure and very short-lived,” indicating that Poe’s claim about the popularity of his cryptography pieces “embodies a considerable exaggeration.” Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius (New York: Knopf, 1926), 104. Most other critics, including Mabbott and W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., seem to take Poe’s word concerning the success of the cryptography articles. See for example Wimsatt, “What Poe Knew About Cryptography,” PMLA 58 (September 1943): 755. 50. Poe may have written about riots against the construction of a railroad for Alexander’s Weekly Messenger. See “The Rail-road War,” in Brigham, Edgar Allan Poe’s Contributions to “Alexander’s Weekly Messenger”, 56–58. 51. Marc Shell, Money, Language and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 5–23.

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52. Michael Williams, “ ‘The language of the cipher’: Interpretation in ‘The GoldBug,’ ” American Literature 53 (1982): 653. 53. Oxford English Dictionary, 1933 ed. On its title page the Lexicon Balatronicum is described as “a dictionary of buckish slang, university wit, and pickpocket eloquence.” 54. W. B. Tyler should perhaps be added to this list of Poe’s “wilful” doubles. 55. Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (1972; New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 128. 56. Poe was certainly quick to level such charges at other writers. In his review of a fundraising volume misleadingly entitled The Pic Nic Papers, he flatly asserts that “No body of men are justified in making capital of the public’s gullibility . . . for any purposes under the sun” (Complete Works, 10:209). Poe, of course, was himself guilty of making capital of the public’s gullibility in hoaxes like “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” in mystifications like “The Gold-Bug,” and “verisimilar experiments” like “Von Kempelen and His Discovery.” Despite—or perhaps because of—his own culpability, Poe made numerous references to literary “robberies.” He denounced Longfellow as “a wealthy and triumphant gentleman of elegant leisure who has only done the vagabond too much honor in knocking him down and robbing him upon the highway” (ER, 720). Poe also accused American publishers who reprinted foreign texts of “robbing the Literary Europe on the highway” (ER, 1037). 57. Shell, Money, Language, and Thought, 17, 22. 58. PT, 561. In Thomas Wyatt’s Synopsis of Natural History (Philadelphia, 1839), which Poe helped to edit, Scarabaeus denotes a genus of the family Lamellicornes, order Coleoptera, class Insects, division Articulata, kingdom Animalia. In modern taxonomy, scarab denotes a family rather than a genus. If Legrand’s bug were a known dungbeetle, for example, contemporary entomological taxonomy might designate it as follows: species—Phanoeus carnifax; genus—Phanoeus; family—Scarabaeidae; superfamily— Scarabaeoidea; suborder—Polyphaga; order—Coleoptera; class—Insecta; phylum— Arthropoda; kingdom—Animalia. See Richard E. White, A Field Guide to the Beetles of North America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983). 59. Complete Works, 14:153–59. 60. For an excellent accounting of Legrand’s rational quest for reference, see Williams, “ ‘The language of the cipher,’ ” 646–60. 61. PT, 560. There are numerous instances in the story where confusion results because of the distance—intellectual and emotional—between Legrand and the other two characters. According to Michael Williams, the narrator is “irremediably obtuse to the possibilities of fixing words in displaced or alternative contexts. Unlike Legrand, the narrator’s thoughtless acceptance of the conventions of his class limits his own use of language and his understanding of others” (651). CHAPTER EIGHT CULTURE OF SURFACES

1. Nora Barlow, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (London: Collins, 1958), 93–94. 2. Ernest Mandel, Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 47. 3. “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” rpt. in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946), 395.

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4. The reference to ideology comes from “On Raymond Chandler,” in The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, ed. Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 124. Jameson’s comment about supreme triviality appears in “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (winter 1979): 132. 5. It is important to note, however, that the culture of surfaces can be read or deciphered only by an uncommon few, such as analytical detectives and calculating angels. 6. Originally published in Godey’s Lady’s Book, November 1844; rpt. in PT, 728–42. Mandel prefers it to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (Delightful Murder, 19), and Julian Symons, himself a mystery writer, affirms that “it is also emphatically a tale of detection, including as it does false clues planted by the villain, and the first instance of the marks made by a rifle barrel being used as a clue in solving a crime.” See Symons, The Tell-Tale Heart: The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Penguin, 1978), 222. 7. Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story (New York: AppletonCentury, 1941), 10. For Haycraft “Thou Art the Man” is not, strictly speaking, a detective story, because crucial evidence is withheld from the reader until after the crime is solved. 8. See Robert M. Walsh, trans., Sketches of Conspicuous Living Characters of France, by Louis L. de Loménie (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1841), 221. Poe reviewed this volume for the April 1841 Graham’s Magazine, the same issue where “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” first appeared. 9. For information on the case, see Mabbott’s introduction to the story in Collected Works 3:715–22. For generous excerpts from contemporary newspaper accounts, see William K. Wimsatt, Jr., “Poe and the Mystery of Mary Rogers,” PMLA 56 (March 1941): 230–48; and John Walsh, Poe the Detective: The Circumstances behind the Mystery of Marie Rogêt (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1967). For an excellent reinterpretation of the significance of the tale, see Laura Saltz, “ ‘(Horrible to Relate!)’: Recovering the Body of Marie Rogêt,” in The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 237–67. 10. Although the review refers to being “hampered by the facts,” it later praises Poe for clearing up much of the confusion surrounding the case: “To this day, with the exception of the light afforded by the tale of Mr. Poe, in which the faculty of analysis is applied to the facts, the whole matter is shrouded in complete mystery. . . . At all events, he has dissipated in our mind, all belief that the murder was perpetrated by more than one” (ER, 872). 11. Larzer Ziff, Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in America (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 67. Ziff argues that Poe’s “poems and tales are only rarely set in a recognizable part of America, bear no conscious relation to the habits of abstract speculation that marked much of its literature, bypass explicit moral themes, are unconcerned with social matters, and adhere to a ‘literary’ diction that is confected.” There is some truth to Ziff’s description, but as I indicate throughout this study, Poe was never isolated from American contexts and contradictions. If he produced the appearance of isolation, then that is an artistic achievement which must be investigated in its own right. 12. In his 1845 footnote, Poe points out that the tale “was composed at a distance from the scene of the atrocity, and with no other means of investigation than the news-

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papers afforded” (PT, 506). He nevertheless feels confidence in the correctness of his general conclusions and “hypothetical details.” 13. Poe complained of having “no proprietary interest” in the Southern Literary Messenger, and when describing similar experiences at Graham’s Magazine, Poe keenly explained that insofar as “Mr. G[raham] was a man of capital and I had no money . . . I was continually laboring against myself” (Letters, 1:205). 14. One of the narrator’s comments in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” emphasizes this point: “Upon reading these various extracts, they not only seemed to me irrelevant, but I could perceive no mode in which any one of them could be brought to bear upon the matter in hand. I waited for some explanation from Dupin” (PT, 536). 15. Among other things, this process of exclusion denies the collective nature of literary production; as Walter Benjamin warns, cultural treasures “owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 256. 16. “On Literary Evolution,” in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays on the Sociology of Literary Forms, rev. ed (London: Verso, 1988), 262–78. Moretti advocates an extreme version of literary Darwinism partly because he believes that no one else has yet made the attempt; according to him, only the Russian Formalists came close with their theory of literary change as a “mutation of systems,” and even this had “no lasting impact” (268). Moretti is in error here, because other materialist critics have made strikingly similar uses of Darwin. In the thirties, Sidney Hook argued that there is “an important distinction between the origin of any cultural fact and its acceptance. In art, for example, all sorts of stylistic variations or mutants appear in any period. The social and political environment acts as a selective agency upon them.” See Hook, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation (New York: The John Day Company, 1933), 160. (It should be noted that Hook later went on to advocate very different critical and political positions.) Presumably, Moretti also did not know of French critic Ferdinand Brunetière’s application of Darwin to literary studies, made some forty years before Hook’s. In 1889, Brunetière argued that literary genres evolve like animal species, and he accordingly sought to demonstrate “in virtue of what circumstances of time and place [genres] originate; how they grow after the manner of living beings, adapting or assimilating all that helps their development; how they perish; and how their disintegrated elements enter into the formation of a new genre.” See Brunetière, L’Evolution de la poésie lyrique; quoted in Irving Babbitt, The Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912; New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1963), 325. 17. “A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labor process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning.” See Marx, Capital, 284. 18. Review of Theodorick Bland’s Reports of Cases decided in the High Court of Chancery of Maryland, Southern Literary Messenger 2 (October 1836): 731. 19. For Dupin as Romantic hero, see Stephano Tani, The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction (Carbon-

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dale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 4–15. For the importance of mystery in romanticism, see Richard Alewyn, “The Origin of the Detective Novel,” in The Poetics of Murder, 74. 20. Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb (New York: Norton, 1980), 84. 21. Collected Works, 29:84. 22. Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, July 1839; rpt. Complete Works, 14:27. For the date of the collaboration between Poe and Wyatt, see Poe Log, 259. 23. The chapter is based on Georges Cuvier’s Le règne animal (Paris, 1817), which was translated (with supplements) by Edward Griffith et al. as The Animal Kingdom by Baron Georges Cuvier (London, 1827). The relevant passage on language, from the English translation, is as follows: “The results of human experience, transmitted by language, modified by reflection, and applied to our various wants and enjoyments, have originated all the arts of human life, whether useful or ornamental. Language and letters, by affording the means of preserving and communicating all acquired knowledge, form, for our species, an indefinite source of perfection” (92). As indicated in the text, Poe sees the accumulation of facts as the cause of writing, giving the passage a very different sense from the original. Additional evidence for Poe’s authorship comes from his 14 February 1847 letter to George Eveleth, where Poe claims that he translated passages from Cuvier for The Conchologist’s First Book, the first work on which he and Wyatt collaborated (Letters, 2:343). If Poe translated Cuvier for this book, he probably did it for the Synopsis as well. 24. Thomas Wyatt, A Synopsis of Natural History (Philadelphia, 1839), 21. 25. Cf. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally et al., trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966). Saussure depicts language (langue) as an impersonal and autonomous system, which is distinct from both human speech (langage) and individual acts of speaking (actes de parole). Because it is a complex social system, “language is not complete in any speaker; it exists perfectly only within a collectivity” (14). From a more liberal perspective, Thomas Kuhn argues that “Scientific knowledge, like language, is intrinsically the common property of a group or else nothing at all.” Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 210. Kuhn seems to miss Saussure’s (and Poe’s) implication: knowledge that is intrinsically the common property of the group is intrinsically beyond the ken of the individual subject. 26. Lucian Minor, “Selection in Reading,” Southern Literary Messenger 2 (February 1836): 19. 27. Cited in Williams, Culture and Society, 35–37. 28. Prefatory essay to The Prose Writers of America, quoted in Poe Log, 694. Interestingly, Griswold praises the new ratiocinative aspects (the “analytical subtlety”) as well as aspects that might be found in a gothic horror tale (“revolting and terrible circumstances”). To reinvoke the discourse of biological evolution, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” would represent a sort of missing link between Poe’s tales of horror and a “pure” tale of ratiocination like “The Purloined Letter.” 29. See his series on “Autography,” his remarks on N. P. Willis (ER, 1125), and his comments in the November 1844 Marginalia (ER, 1322–23). 30. Collected Works, 3:972. 31. He was in such a hurry to sell “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” that he offered it simultaneously to two different publishers. See Letters, 1:199–203.

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32. See, for example, Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 39–66; and Franco Moretti, “Clues,” collected in Signs Taken for Wonders, 130–56. 33. John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1976), 91–92; Judith Fetterley, “Reading about Reading: ‘A Jury of Her Peers,’ ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ ” in Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 154–58. 34. As to the real perpetrator, it is important to recall the unlikelihood that either Poe or his readers had ever seen an orangutan. The strangeness of the orangutan would allow its contours to be filled out by a political imagination, and in antebellum America such an imagination would perhaps see a similarity between Poe’s orangutan and black slaves. See my “Edgar Allan Poe and the Horrid Laws of Political Economy,” American Quarterly 44 (September 1992): 381–417. 35. Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure, 5, 7. 36. Clive Bloom, “Capitalizing on Poe’s Detective: the Dollars and Sense of Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction,” in Nineteenth-Century Suspense: From Bloom to Conan Doyle, ed. Bloom et al. (Hampshire, UK: Macmillan, 1988), 24. 37. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700– 1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 38. Both Poe and Bentley had their appetites for information whetted by their upbringing in merchants’ households. According to Brown, Bentley’s circle of commercial friends enabled him “to become expert in commercial matters and well-informed regarding the overseas interests of his community without venturing outside his own parish. . . . Raised as he was in a merchant’s household, Bentley respected the knowledge and prowess of men of affairs whose information was often fresher and more direct than what Bentley could glean from print. Moreover what he learned from his merchant friends was not available in any library” (203). 39. Jefferson wrote ten thousand personal letters, many of them designed to instruct or to convey useful knowledge. Although it would be difficult for an individual to duplicate that feat, an institution or a mass-circulation periodical could perform a similar task with relative ease. 40. To get a sense of how these were marketed, it is worthwhile to cite the subtitle of Arnold James Cooley’s The Book of Useful Knowledge, a multivolume work that Poe mentioned many times as editor of the Broadway Journal. The title page of each volume proclaimed “A Cyclopedia of Several Thousand Practical Receipts, and Collateral Information in the Arts, Manufactures, and Trades,—including Medicine, Pharmacy, and Domestic Economy. Designed as a Compendious Book of Reference for the Manufacturer, Tradesman, Amateur, and Heads of Families.” 41. “Letter to Mr. —— ——,” PT, 13. In this regard it is worthwhile to note Emerson’s 1842 journal entry on the “superficial” nature of American urban life: “In New York City lately, as in cities generally, one seems to lose all substance, and become surface in a world of surfaces. Everything is external, and I remember my hat and coat, and all my other surfaces, and nothing else.” Quoted in Robert H. Byer, “Mysteries of the City: A Reading of ‘Poe’s Man of the Crowd,’ ” in Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 221–22.

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42. As noted above, this predicament was due to many factors, including technological advancements, the efforts of the state and nongovernmental associations, and lax copyright laws, which enabled American publishers to reprint foreign works at will. Concerning the relative surplus of professional intellectuals, it should be pointed out the phenomenon was first perceived as a problem by the intellectual elite. James Madison, for example, advised his nephew that “the great and increasing number of our universities, colleges, and academies, and other seminaries, are already throwing out crops of educated youth beyond the demand for them in the professions and pursuits requiring such preparations.” Madison to Richard D. Cutts, 12 September 1835. Cited in Drew R. McCoy, The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 203. 43. ER, 1062. The culture of surfaces was partly a response to feigned brilliance and a false erudition. Cf. Poe’s remarks on Robert Southey: “Erudition is only certainly known in its total results. The mere grouping together of mottoes from the greatest multiplicity of the rarest works, or even the apparently natural interweaving into any composition, of the sentiments and manner of these works, are attainments within the reach of any well- informed, ingenious and industrious man having access to the great libraries of London” (ER, 343). Bulwer is more vehemently denounced for trying to “ape the externals of a deep meaning” (ER, 1062). Similar charges, of course, could be leveled against Poe himself. 44. Extending the concept of a “zeroworker,” one might classify Dupin as a kind of zerowriter. The term “zerowork” (the refusal of capitalist labor) comes from the Italian Autonomia movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. For information on Autonomia and the work of Antonio Negri, the theorist closely associated with the movement, see the Introductions by Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano to Negri’s Marx Beyond Marx (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1984). For one version of what Poe may have wished for in a signifying environment, see “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” quoted below. 45. Poe’s comments on the daguerreotype originally appeared on 15 January 1840 and are reprinted in Brigham, Edgar Allan Poe’s Contributions to “Alexander’s Weekly Messenger,” 21–22. 46. Modern-day heralds of the information society share many of the same assumptions. According to Daniel Bell, for example, a post-industrial society is characterized “not by a labor theory of value but by a knowledge theory of value.” Extrapolating from ideological and economic trends of the sixties, Bell wants to chart the ascendancy of a knowledge class that would rationally organize data, scientific research, and society itself. For him, this ascendancy is virtually guaranteed by certain intrinsic differences between information and industrial commodities, differences that make information “a collective good” that can be distributed to all and yet remain with the producer even after it is sold (xiv). See Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1976). This is not the place to offer a critique, but in retrospect Bell would have been more correct to predict the rise of a new information proletariat. Since the 1970s, there has been a dramatic increase in information sector employment, an increase consisting largely of lower paying jobs in telecommunications, computer services, and data processing. See James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: The Technological Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 24.

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47. New York Weekly Mirror, 12 October 1844, 15. Cited in Bruce I. Weiner, The Most Noble of Professions: Poe and the Poverty of Authorship, (Baltimore: Enoch Pratt Free Library, 1987), 9. 48. Quoted in Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 20. 49. In “The Rationale of Verse” Poe argues that “it is the nature of Truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial” and that “the clearest subject may be overclouded by mere superabundance of talk” (ER, 27). 50. Like the romantics, Poe believed that “the higher order of poetry is, and always will be, in this country, unsaleable” (Letters, 1:216). Unlike the romantics, however, Poe often viewed wealth, especially the wealth which renders one “independent,” as a positive aid to poetic creation. Thus in “The Domain of Arnheim,” Poe’s happiest poet is also his wealthiest character. See Chapter Nine for a discussion of the tale. CHAPTER NINE THE INVESTIGATING ANGEL: POE, BABBAGE, AND “THE POWER OF WORDS”

1. Letters of Marshall McLuhan, ed. Matie Molinaro, Corrinne McLuhan, and William Toye (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987), 373. 2. Stuart Levine and Susan Levine, eds., The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 107. 3. “As regards the greater truths, men oftener err by seeking them at the bottom than at the top; the depth lies in the huge abysses where wisdom is sought—not in the palpable places where she is found” (PT, 13). 4. Lucian Minor, “The New Year,” Southern Literary Messenger 4 ( January 1838): 1. 5. In “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” the novice angel (Eiros) describes the final days of the earth, and in “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” the veteran angel (Monos) recounts his sensations during—and after—the physical decay of his body. 6. J. Gerald Kennedy, for example, refers to “an apparently serious notion of both the survival of the soul and the creative power of language.” See Kennedy, Poe, Death and the Life of Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 205. Taylor Stoehr suggests that “this power depends somehow on the physical nature of the words themselves,” but he wonders whether Poe himself seriously embraced Agathos’ scientific claims. See Stoehr, “’Unspeakable Horror’ in Poe,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 78 (Summer 1979): 327. Herbert E. Mierow alternately refers to the tale as a “show of scientific reasoning” and “pseudo-scientific reasoning.” See Mierow, “Stephen Phillips and Edgar Allan Poe,” Modern Language Notes 32 (December 1917): 500–501. By contrast, Stuart Levine and Susan Levine suggest that Poe and other romantics “were attempting to restore to art its ancient properties of science, magic, and prophecy.” The Levines claim that Poe was influenced by Thomas Carlyle’s 1832 essay on “Boswell’s Life of Johnson,” and they quote the following passage from Carlyle as a plausible “motto” for the tale: “Nothing dies, nothing can die. No idlest word thou speakest but is a seed cast into Time, and grows through all Eternity!” (The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, 107). For the other positions mentioned, see Allen Tate, “The Angelic Imagination,” in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,

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1966), 236–54; Michael J. S. Williams, A World of Words, 14–15; and Joseph N. Riddel, “The ‘Crypt’ of Edgar Poe,” Boundary 2 8 (1979): 117–44. 7. Tate, “The Angelic Imagination,” 250 (italics in Tate). Quoted from Pensées, trans. H. F. Stewart (New York, 1950), 377. 8. Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 1. 9. See Peter Mark Roget, Animal and Vegetable Physiology Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (London: William Pickering, 1834), xv. 10. Complete Works, 8:206. 11. See, for example, Letters, 1:256–57. 12. As we have seen, “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob” satirizes a method of cutting and pasting together passages from various texts as a shortcut to painstaking original composition. And upon learning of Faber’s speaking automaton in 1846, Poe noted that “There remains only one achievement—a machine to think. We should say, perhaps, there has remained; for certain books lately printed induce us to believe that some people think by machine” (ER, 1116). 13. Dickens made the remarks on 27 September 1869, while accepting the presidency of the Birmingham and Midland Institute. Dickens alters Babbage’s theory somewhat to fit his own argument, but he specifically mentions Babbage’s Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. See The Speeches of Charles Dickens: A Complete Edition, ed. K. J. Fielding (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1988), 399. 14. “The Pencil of Nature. A New Discovery,” The Corsair 1.5 (13 April 1839): 71. 15. Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. A Fragment, 2d ed. (1838; reprint, London: Frank Cass and Company, 1967), 33. All further references are to this edition. 16. Oinos, for example, remarks that “certain operations of what we term Nature, or the natural laws, will, under certain conditions, give rise to that which has all the appearance of creation” (PT, 823). Later, Agathos echoes Babbage’s statement on the “comprehensive law impressed on matter at the dawn of existence” when he describes “the first word” which “spoke into existence the first law” (PT, 823). 17. ER, 941. As J. Gerald Kennedy has indicated, however, it is not clear whether the Tsalal text has been composed by the author Poe or the Author divine. See Kennedy, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” and the Abyss of Interpretation, 79–80. 18. Complete Works, 14:157–58. 19. See Kent Ljungquist, The Grand and the Fair: Poe’s Landscape Aesthetics and Pictorial Techniques (Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1984), 129–34; and Liliane Weissberg, “In Search of Truth and Beauty: Allegory in ‘Berenice’ and ‘The Domain of Arnheim,’ ” in Poe and His Times: The Artist and His Milieu, ed. Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV (Baltimore: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1990), 66–75. 20. Harold Beaver, ed., The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Penguin, 1976), 411, n. 47. 21. Like “The Power of Words,” Eureka includes an account of the material consequences of movement, though the latter text presents the idea with greater flourish: “If I venture to displace, by even the billionth part of an inch, the microscopical speck of dust which lies now on the point of my finger. . . I have done a deed which shakes the Moon in her path, which causes the Sun to be no longer the Sun, and which alters

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forever the destiny of the multitudinous myriads of stars that roll and glow in the majestic presence of their Creator” (PT, 1286). Like the “Marginalia” from the November 1844 Democratic Review, Eureka contains an account of “the mutuality of adaptation” that concludes with the claim that “The Universe is a plot of God” (PT, 1341–42). This passage constitutes a nearly verbatim reproduction from the “Marginalia,” but Poe has deleted the two references to the Bridgewater treatises, as if he were covering his tracks. Near the end of Eureka, moreover, Poe makes another subtle change in his cosmology, transforming the universe from a “plot” to a “poem” (PT, 1349). 22. PT, 1359. As if fulfilling a strange design, the development of Poe’s materialist theology mirrors the ending of Pym, where the narrative shifts from the earth-writing on Tsalal to an apocalyptic climax (of annihilation, or divine salvation, or both). 23. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 54. 24. Kennedy, Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 195. 25. This of course harkens back to Poe’s first review of a Bridgewater treatise, where he argues that “the result of the combination of a number of intellects is seldom . . . equal to the sum of the results of the same intellects laboring individually” (Complete Works, 8:209). The point is made more forcefully in the tales of ratiocination, where the polymath Dupin matches wits with a police bureaucracy whose “ingenuity is a faithful representative of that of the mass” (PT, 690). Significantly, however, Poe impugns the ratiocinative method in “The Man of the Crowd,” where the narrator fails to penetrate the mystery of the old man who compulsively circulates among the London masses. (Nor, ironically, does the narrator understand this same compulsion in himself.) 26. PT, 336. The link between the sound of waters and the sound of human voices is reinforced by the description of the public assembly in “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall”: “Nevertheless, about noon, a slight but remarkable agitation became apparent in the assembly; the clattering of ten thousand tongues succeeded; and, in an instant afterwards, ten thousand faces were upturned towards the heavens, ten thousand pipes descended simultaneously from the corners of ten thousand mouths, and a shout, which could be compared to nothing but the roaring of Niagara, resounded long, loudly and furiously, through all the environs of Rotterdam” (PT, 951).

INDEX

Adams, John Quincy, 46, 187 Addison, Joseph, Cato, 205–6, 211–12 allegory, 100, 291n32; as vehicle for political ideas, 96–97; see also symbolism aesthetics, and overproduction of literature, 77; the perfect plot, 263–64; pleasure versus truth 85–86; popular and critical taste, 90–96; and the popular tale, 84–85; unity of effect, 95–96, 102–3; Ainsworth, William, Guy Fawkes, 88–89 Albion, Robert G., 80, 283n45 Allan, John, 5, 22, 23, 24, 196, 211; warns against political involvement, 30 Allen, Hervey, 59 Allen, Michael, 72, 291n22 Almy, Robert F., 153, 282n32 Althusser, Louis, 15–16 angelic dialogues, 252, 262, 271–72; and tales of ratiocination, 251, 253–54 Anthon, Charles, 32, 61, “Affiliation of Languages,” 171–72 Aristidean, 136–37 Augusta Chronicle, 180 authors, pay of, 21, 49–55, 75, 81 Babbage, Charles, 19, 78, 249–50, 254– 67 Bailyn, Bernard, 206 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 34–35 Bancroft, George, 30 Bank of the United States, Second, 196 Bank War, 198–200 Barthes, Roland, 279n34 Beaver, Harold, 175, 178, 302n3 Bell, Daniel, 319n46 Beniger, James R., 41, 283n45 Benjamin, Walter, 316n15 Bentley, William, 241–42, 246 Benton, Thomas Hart, 198, 200 Biddle, Nicholas, 198–99 Bird, Robert M., Sheppard Lee, 138, 179 Bloom, Clive, 240 Bolton, Richard, 207, 214–15 Book of Daniel, 172–73 Bourgin, Frank, 283n40 Bransby, Rev. John, 233 Brauer, Kinley, 187

Bridgewater treatises, 254–55, 263–64, 266– 67, 322n21, 322n25 Briggs, Charles, 135 Brigham, Clarence I., 285n74 Broadway Journal, 135–36 Brother Jonathan, 24 Brown, Albert Gallatin, 188 Brown, Richard D., Knowledge Is Power, 241– 42 Brown, William Wells, 301n78 Buckingham, J. S., 122, 297n33 Budd, Louis J., 281n18 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, Poe’s review of Rienzi, 82–83; as a popular novelist, 84–86, 93 Buranelli, Vincent, 72 Burke, Edmund, 284n55 Burton, William, 24, 305n44 Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, 24, 33, 198– 99, Byer, Robert H., 318n41 Caesar, 205 Calhoun, John C., 40 Capital Reader, 9–11, 15, 38, 42, 75, 98, 204, 271–73, 279n34 capitalism and literature, 9, 15, 20, 26, 27, 103–8, 191–92 Carey, John L., Domestic Slavery, 131; Slavery in Maryland, Briefly Considered, 133 Carter, Robert, 135 Cato the Younger, 205; see also Joseph Addison Cawelti, John, 237 Cecil, L. Moffitt, 174 Chapman, Maria Weston, 134 Charvat, William, 48, 52, 90 Child, David Lee, The Taking of Naboth’s Vineyard, 136 Child, Lydia Maria, 138 Chivers, Thomas H., 29 Chorley, Henry F., 35 Clark, Lewis Gaylord, 69 Clay, Henry, 187, 200, 214 Clemm, Maria, 211 Cockton, Henry, 102 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 81, 111

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INDEX

colonialism, contrasted with “commercial” imperialism, 181–83 Colton, George H., 63 common knowledge, contrasted with information, 43–45, 206, 271–73; and cryptography, 216, 222 computers, see Charles Babbage, the Difference Engine copyright legislation, 36, 37, 43 Crévecoeur, J. Hector St. Jean de, 151 cryptography, 195–224 passim; and politics, 201–4, as lucrative skill, 202 culture of surfaces, 99–100, 244–48, 250, 268–73 Daniel, John Moncure, 288n20 Darwin, Charles, 225, 233 Davis, Susan G. 289n2 Dayan, Joan, 112, 130, 145, 299n53 Dayton, Tim, 279n32 Denning, Michael, 291n19 detective tales, 44, 92, 225–48; and ideology, 225, 232; and intellectual labor, 231–32; and the overproduction of information, 235; popularity of, 238; and urban life, 230 Dew, Thomas R., 125, 130–31, 143, 299n55 Dickens, Charles, 24, 91–95; and Charles Babbage, 256; and genius, 89, 291n28; Poe’s review of Barnaby Rudge, 91–94 Difference Engine, 254, 256, 257 Douglass, Frederick, 179 Dow, Jesse Erskine, 204 Draper, John W., 50, 285n69, 285n70 Drayton, William, 181; see also slavery Dupin, André-Marie-Jean-Jacques, 228, 234 Duyckinck, Evert, 292n39 earth-writing, see material language Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 138–39, 301n76 English, Thomas Dunn, 136–37 Exman, Eugene, 163–64, 277n21 exploration narratives, 148, 149, 150, 157– 67; controlled by publishers, 163–64, 167; distinction between real and imaginary, 154–55; mixed purposes of, 156–57, 167– 68, 184–85; and nationalism, 159 Faber’s speaking automaton, 78 fanaticism, and Poe’s attack on Lowell, 137 Fetterley, Judith, 239

Fisher, Benjamin Franklin IV, 294n10, 321n19 Frailey, Dr. Charles S., 202–3 Franklin, Benjamin, 151 Freemasonry, 98–99 Freimarck, Vincent, 114 Fuller, Margaret, 46 Galloway, David, 73 Garrison, William Lloyd, 125 Gates, Henry Louis, 184 geological surveys, 174–75 genius, as casualty of the publishing industry, 36, 37, 61; and popularity, 89, 95 Gibbon, Edward, 83 Gilmore, Michael T., 6, 275n10 Gold Humbug, see Thomas Hart Benton Goodrich, Carter, 41 Goodwin, Noma Lee, 295n15 Gould, Stephen Jay, 232–33, 236 Graham, George R., 72–74, 316n13 Graham’s Magazine, 63, 70, 289n30 Grant, Anne, Memoirs of an American Lady, 128 Green, Duff, 295n15 Greenblatt, Stephen, 293n1 Greene, Asa, A Glance at New York, 277n22 Gurley, Ralph, Life of Jehudi Ashmun, 129 Hall, Harrison, 81 Harper & Brothers, 9–11, 139–40, 162– 63 Harrison, William Henry, 199 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 85, 100–103, 292n39 Haycraft, Howard, 240 Heath, James E., 55–57, 146, 276n17; position on slavery, 126; possible author of Slavery in Maryland: An Anti-Slavery Review, 133–34 Henry, Patrick, and Addison’s Cato, 206 Hirst, Henry B., 63–64, 96 historicism, 3, 15–17, 27, 47, 61–62, 195, 271–73 history, as a popular genre, 52, 83 Hodgson, John, 211–12, 312n40 Hoffman, Daniel, 218 Hook, Sidney, 316n16 Horne, R. H., and use of allegory, 97 Hovey, Kenneth Alan, 114, 130 “Howard, H. L.” (Charles J. Wells), 94–95 Hubbell, Jay B., 48

INDEX

Hull, William D., 130–31 Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine, 25, 185, 188 Hyman, Anthony, 255 imperialism, formal and informal, 182– 83; and the “trainable savage,” 183–84, 190 information, and capitalist development, 18, 22, 40–43, 77, 242; and exploration, 147, 151, 154, 189; and literature, 7, 80, 105– 6, 232, 271–73; as thinking material, 26, 42, 50, 271 Ingraham, Joseph Holt, The South-West, 128, 298n49 Ingram, John Henry, 59 Inman, John, 277n21 internal improvements, 31, 106 Irwin, John T., 150, 303n9 Jacobs, Robert D., 282n36 Jackson, Andrew, 28, 30, 54, 196, 198, 205 Jackson, David K., 275n3, 288n21 Jameson, Frederic, 111–12, 148, 225, 315n4 Jefferson, Thomas, 40, 155, 165, 304n22 John, Richard R., 283n44 Kaplan, Sidney, 178 Keith, Alexander, 163 Kennedy, J. Gerald, 190, 269, 287n6, 308n80, 320n6, 321n17 Kennedy, John Pendleton, 44, 275n3, 284n63 Kesilman, Sylvan H., 310n14 Kidd, Captain William, 217–18; and Julia Gardiner Tyler, 202 Knickerbocker Magazine, 69 Kopley, Richard, 293n3 Lacan, Jacques, and La Chatte bizzare, 150 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 168, 176–77 Lee, A. Robert, 115 Lee, Kun Jong, 301n76 Lever, Charles James, 24, 93–94 Levin, Harry, 305n45 Levine, Stuart, and Susan Levine, 252, 320n6 Lewis and Clark expedition, 155, 156, 157, 162, 165, 187 Lewis, Matthew Gregory, and Africans in The Castle Spectre, 144, 185 Liberator, 135–36 Lewis, Meriwether, and morbid sensibility, 158

325

Liberia, 180–81 literary form, material basis of, 107–8, and origins, 232–38; and repetition, 228–29, 236; see also angelic dialogues, detective tales, exploration narratives literary market, contrasted with publishing environment, 6 literary nationalism, 55–57, 142–43; and political sectionalism, 122–23, 186; see also exploration narratives, nationalism Ljungquist, Kent, 265, 321n19 Locke, Richard Adams, 25 Longfellow, Henry W., Poems on Slavery, 136 Longstreet, Augustus Baldwin, 55 Lowell, James Russell, 38, 135, 137, 147, 191, 197 Mabbott, Thomas O., 63, 239, 252 Machlup, Fritz, 43 McGrane, R. C., 21 McKean, James Norman, 275n7 McLuhan, Marshall, 249, 251, 270 Madison, James, 319n42 Madisonian, 200; “Eleonora” reprinted in, 214 magazine ventures, 38, 44, 61–65, 69–75, 144, 166 Mandel, Ernest, 225 Manifest Destiny, 6, 182–83, 189 Mann, Horace, 40 Marchand, Ernest, 281n18, 293n3 Marryatt, Frederick, 101 Marx, Karl, 10–11, 106–7, 183, 233, 236, 267, 270–71, 278n26 mass audience, 86–105 passim; mixed nature of, 25, 86–87, 95; and Poe’s criticism, 76; Poe’s response to, 80–82; and literary value, 99–104; and tales of ratiocination, 238; see also aesthetics, capitalism and literature, detective tales material language, and earth-writing, 170–74, 262; and fulfillment of the poetic sentiment, 264–66; and the original human tongue, 171–74; as a response to capitalism, 19, 170–71, 174, 260, 268, 272; see also “The Power of Words” materialism, 20, 250–51, 255, 271–73 Matthiessen, F. O., 4, 293n3 Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick, 158, 186, 305n39 Meyers, Marvin, 198

326

INDEX

Minor, Lucian, “Address on Education,” 31; on African colonization, 124–25, 180– 81; contrasted with Poe, 3–5, 27–28, 251; “Letters from New England,” 5, 31; on literary overproduction, 11–14, 17; “Selection in Reading,” 11–12, 36; on the waning of total knowledge, 12–13 Moldenhauer, Joseph J., 309n10 money, and capital, 217–21; disputes over the form of, 197, 200, 206, 218; in the middle ages, 52 Moretti, Franco, 232, 233, 236 Morrell, Abbey Jane, 304n31 Morrell, Benjamin, Narrative of Four Voyages, 158, 163, 168; ghost-written by Samuel Woodworth, 164; and imperialism, 181–83; and the treachery of natives, 178–79; and the treachery of whites, 190 Morrison, Toni, 301n80 Moore, Thomas, 21, 101, 252 Moss, Sidney, 71 nationalism, 186–89; see also literary nationalism, exploration narratives, imperialism natural religion, 254–55, 257 Nelson, Dana D., 116, 130, 146, 175, 295n13, 302n85 New World, 24 New York Sun, 24–25 newspapers, 24–25, 78 novelty, 39–47, 90, 100–103, 106 Ostrom, John W., 211, 291n22 O’Sullivan, John L., 6 “Outis,” 62–63 overproduction of literature, 11–15; 17; 39, 46–47, 76; and law of supply and demand, 49, 50 Panic of 1837, 9, 21, 24, 25, 198; and new intellectual entities, 251–52 Park, Mungo, 165, 168–69, 181 Parrington, Vernon Louis, 4 patronage, Poe’s quest for government employment, 202–4, 214; see also cryptography Paulding, James Kirke, issues orders for the United States Exploring Expedition, 165– 66, 183–84; Letters from the South, 165; literary advice to Poe, 10; as Naval Secretary, 47; Slavery in the United States, 113, 165, 181, 308n70;

Penn Magazine, 70–74; see also magazine ventures plagiarism, and “internally persuasive discourse,” 34–35; Poe’s crusade against, 13, 45–46; and poetic sentiment, 247 Poe, Edgar Allan, aristocratic pretensions, 87– 88; aversion to partisan issues, 27–31, 262; and collective action by authors, 191, 234– 35; and commercial discourse, 23; on didactic literature, 265; literary radicalism of, 35–39; on the origin of writing, 237; and philanthropy, 34; on profundity, 3, 84, 98, 246; on publisher’s control, 278n30; and romanticism, 62, 81, 250, 261; salary and income, 5, 21, 72; and science, 33–34, 47–48; support of progressive causes, 31–35; see also aesthetics, capitalism and literature, literary form, mass audience, magazine ventures, material language, patronage, plagiarism, publishing environment, and slavery Poe, Edgar Allan, writings: “The American Drama,” 44, 255; “Anastatic Printing,” 53– 54, 262–63, 278n28, 285n74; “The Balloon-Hoax,” 33; “Berenice,” 7–9; 14; “The Cask of Amontillado,” 98–100, 173; “A Chapter on Science and Art,” 33–34; “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” 262; “The Domain of Arnheim,” 173, 212, 264– 66; “Eleonora,” 214, 313n46; Eureka, 51, 253, 266–69, 272, 321n21; “Exordium to Critical Notices,” 39; “A Few Words on Secret Writing,” 207–16, 311n33;“The Folio Club,” 80, 81, 97, 270; “The Gold- Bug,” 19, 37, 140–41, 173; 194–224 passim; “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” 27; Journal of Julius Rodman, 156–57; “The Landscape Garden,” 212, 264; “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.,” 26, 69; “The Living Writers of America,” 49; “Maelzel’s Chess Player,” 256; “The Man That Was Used Up,” 29; “The Man of the Crowd,” 104–5, 322n25; “MS. Found in a Bottle,” 160–61; “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 231, 239–42, 249, 317n28; “Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” 228–32, 243, 317n31; Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 18–19, 115, 139–40, 145, 147–92; “The Philosophy of Composition,” 39, 44, 90–91, 291n32; “The Philosophy of Furniture,” 247; “The Power of Words,” 19–20, 173, 249–73; “A Predicament,” 140–41; “The

INDEX

Purloined Letter,” 19, 37, 243–48; “Shadow—A Parable,” 249, 268–70; “Some Words with a Mummy,” 29; “Sonnet—To Science,” 33, 170; “Thou Art the Man,” 226–28; “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade,” 256; “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall,” 33, 151– 52, 322n26; “Von Kempelen and His Discovery,” 50; “X-ing a Paragrab,” 215–16 Poe, Virginia, 211 Polk, James K., 29, Pollard, Edward, 189 Pollin, Burton, 158, 164, 178, 214, 276n15, 305n32 political criticism, 16, 113 political parties, Anti-Masonic Party, 28, 99; Democrats, 29; Whigs, 28, 29, 199–200, 205 polymath, as response to overproduction, 13– 14, 108, 241–43, 251–52 Porter, Carolyn, 151, 303n10 postal system, 40–41 Pratt, Mary Louise, 168, 181 Pred, Allan R., 78, 290n4 Prescott, William, 51 public intellectuals, 4–6; contrasted with commercial writers, 13; and economic development, 32–33 publishing environment, 6–7, 17, 21, 105–8, 271–73; influence on literary form, 9, 107–8; and law of supply and demand, 21; and literary innovation, 233–38; in New York, 79 Quinn, Arthur H., 64, 293n3 Rachman, Stephen, 315n9 Remini, Robert, 198 Renza, Louis, 208, 311n34 Reynolds, David S., 167, on the subversive imagination, 89–90; Reynolds, Jeremiah N., 33, 147, 148, 152–54, 159, 163, 168–70, 251; on the cruelty of white sailors, 190; and imperialism, 181– 84; and nationalism, 186 Ricardou, Jean, 150, 192 Ridgely, Joseph V., 162, 171, 296n28, 304n30, 305n46 Robins, Kevin, 78, 290n8 Robinson, Douglas, 149–50, 302n5 Roget, Mark Peter, 255 Rosenheim, Shawn, 208–9, 311n34, 312n38

327

Rosenthal, Bernard, 114, 115, 119, 121, 130– 32, 294n6 Rowe, John Carlos, 115, 130–31, 183, 302n85 Royster, Elmira, 211 Rubin, Louis D., 4, 275n2, 294n9 Saltz, Laura, 315n9 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 317n25 Schudson, Michael, 290n7 Sedgwick, Catherine M., The Linwoods, 138, 141 Shakespeare, William, 24, 280n10 Shell, Marc, 216–17 Silverman, Kenneth, 4, 275n2, 292n36 Simms, William Gilmore, 179 simplicity, as aesthetic category, 8, 276n17 slavery, 18, 111–46; anti-slavery periodicals in the South, 134–35; and Charles Babbage, 261; and literacy, 179–80; PauldingDrayton review, 112–21, 125, 176; and the Southern Literary Messenger, 125–27 Smith, Adam, 49, 285n68 Smithsonian Institution, 34, 282n34 Snodgrass, Joseph E., 131–35, 199, 299n61 South, and imperialism, 177–92 passim; and the publishing industry, 55–57, 297n32; Southern Literary Messenger, 15, 58–75, 122, 287n5; early policy toward slavery, 125– 27; national image, 122–24, 297n32; and Poe’s employment, 3–6; and political issues, 31, 122–30 Sparhawk, Edward V., 124 Speaks, Michael, 279n32 Steuart, R. S., A Letter on Slavery, 133 Stephens, John L., Incidents of Travel in the Holy Land, 163, 168–69, 257 The Stylus, 70–74; as device for material permanence, 270, 306n52; as a political organ for John Tyler, 203; see also magazine ventures Swisshelm, Jane, 135 symbolism, material basis of, 98, 261; Poe’s criticism of, 84, 96–98; as political instrument, 175–76 Symzonia, 162 Symmes, John Cleves, 148, 152 sympathy, and the mass audience, 101–2, 223 Tate, Allen, “The Angelic Imagination,” 253– 54

328

INDEX

Taylor, George Rogers, 6, 32, 276n11 Taylor, William R., 305n34 Tise, Larry, 297n39 thinking material, see information Thomas, Dwight, 134, 275n3 Thomas, Frederick W., 28, 29, 64, 201 Thompson, G. R., 112, 138, 293n2, 300n74 Tomlin, John, 206 Trachtenberg, Alan, 275n9 transcendentalism, 97, 100, 103, 291n32 transportation revolution, 6, 32, 41, 80, 276n11 Trotsky, Leon, 286n78 Tucker, Beverley, 112, 141, 145; as author of the Paulding-Drayton Review, 116–21; criticizes “MS. Found in a Bottle,” 160; The Partisan Leader, 117–19, 126–27, 296n22 Tucker, George, 81 Tucker, Henry St. George, 127 Turner, Nat, 179–80 Tyler, John, 28, 196, 199, “His Accidency,” 200, on the form of money, 201; poses as a foe of tyrants, 204–6; recites Poe’s poetry, 214; subscriber to the Southern Literary Messenger, 203 Tyler, Julia Gardiner, and Captain Kidd, 202; hires F. W. Thomas, 202 Tyler, Robert, 201–3; and allegory, 96, “Tyler, W. B.,” 208–16 United States Exploring Expedition, 33, 148, 152; funding for, 153; as a response to British imperialism, 187; and a sequel to Pym, 162 Upshur, Abel P., 126–27 urbanization, 77–82 Van Buren, Martin, 124, 198, 298n44 Von Raumer, Frederick, 51–52

Walsh, Robert M., Sketches of Conspicuous Living Characters of France, 228, 234 Warren, Samuel, Ten Thousand a Year, 197 Webster, Frank, 78, 290n8 Weidman, Bette S., 281n24 Werner, Craig, 115, 294n10 Warner, Michael, 171, 305n45 Washington, George, fondness for Addison’s Cato, 206 Weiner, Bruce I., 320n47 Weissberg, Liliane, 265, 321n19 Whigs, see politics White, Hugh Lawson, 205 White, Thomas Willis, and Beverley Tucker, 117; as an entrepreneur, 66–68; fastidious editorial policy, 8; Poe’s comments on, 61– 62; preference for Lucian Minor over Poe, 5; and the Southern literary market, 122– 24 whiteness, political and symbolic implications of, 145, 148 Whitney, Eli, 78, 106 Wilkes, Lieutenant Charles, 165–6 Williams, Michael J. S., 314n52, 314n61, 320n6 Williams, Raymond, 62, 81, 237, 304n26 Willis, N. P., as popular author, 89 Wilmer, Lambert, 13 Wilson, Edmund, 225 Wilson, R. Jackson, 6, 275n9 Wirt, William, 28, 99 Wise, Henry, 310n24 Woodberry, George, 59 Woodworth, Samuel, 164 Wyatt, Thomas, Synopsis of Natural History, 236–37 Zboray, Ronald J., 282n29 zerowork, 319n44 Ziff, Larzer, 315n11 Zoilus, 269

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