World Mythology

I’m really invested in all-things-EAP this week because of my giddy anticipation for Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher, which just dropped on Netflix. I love Poe’s macabre short stories that much, and Flanagan, a modern master of horror, hasn’t disappointed me yet. 

Whether you think Edgar Allan Poe’s stories are well-crafted explorations of the dark side or overwrought melodramas, there’s no doubt his work has had a tremendous impact on Western culture. Probably his most important contribution, apart from creating the contemporary short story format and inventing the detective story, is revitalizing the Gothic genre and pushing horror fiction in a more philosophical direction. His stories remain influential because of the depth he added to the eerie plots and thrilling imagery, redefining modern Western literature in the process. He accomplished this feat by perverting the Gothic.

By the time Poe arrived on the scene, Gothic fiction had already fossilized to the point of parody. What started with the fantastic absurdities of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and culminating in the complexity of Anne Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) had eventually led to Northanger Abbey (1817), Jane Austin’s metafictional send-up of what had become pretty stale conventions by then: crumbling castles, tormented heroines, supernatural entities, and family curses. Although the external trappings of Gothic plots may have fallen into ruin, its themes remained relevant.

According to Joyce Carol Oates, a master of the genre in her own right, Gothic fiction explores the fragmentation of the mind, alienated by historical and biological forces that can overwhelm one’s ability to grasp reality and make rational choices. Emerging as part of the Romantic movement, Gothic storytelling was a critical antidote to the naïvely utopian visions of progress inspired by the Enlightenment and of particular interest to 19th century American writers who were questioning the idea of being able to pursue happiness in a rational way.

‘Gothic’ suggests the fear of something primal and regressive that threatens to undermine mental and social stability. They’re stories about things falling apart, decomposing. In order to be culturally relevant again, Gothic literature needed a writer who could reanimate its tropes. It needed a morbid, hypersensitive, and arrogant genius named Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe’s key twist was turning the tropes inward, starting with the macabre landscape within—“the terror of the soul,” he called it. By the 1830s, Poe was focused on composing short fiction, crafting tightly-constructed tales, rendered in dense, pompous prose, spewing from the cracked psyches of unreliable narrators. This is the dark heart of many of his most famous stories: “Ligeia” (1838), “William Wilson” (1839),  “The Black Cat” (1843), “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), just to name a few. “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), arguably his most accomplished story, flips this dynamic: an unnamed and relatively reasonable narrator details the psychic disintegration of Roderick Usher. 

Poe’s reality-challenged protagonists aren’t the true innovation, though. Marlowe and Shakespeare had pioneered that literary territory centuries before in the form of the soliloquy coming from the brains of some truly messed up men, Doctor Faustus and Macbeth to name a few. The element that Poe perfects—the thing that both revitalizes and Americanizes the Gothic—is reframing mental fragility it in terms of what he calls, “the spirit of the perverseness.”

The alcoholic narrator in “The Black Cat” (1843) presents this idea to the reader as an explanation for his own violent tendencies. He says perversity is “one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties…which give direction to the character of Man.” What is its function? It is the “unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself,” the narrator says, “a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment” to commit a “vile or a silly action.”

In “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845), the narrator claims that perversity is “a radical, primitive, irreducible sentiment,” so deep and pervasive, that it’s ultimately immune to the prescriptions of the analytical mind. In other words, Poe identified the disruptive and neurotic effects of the unconscious half a century before Freud burst onto the scene. Furthermore, his description of this mindset prefigures Jung’s archetypal interpretation of the trickster as a tendency towards self-sabotage, an irrational X-factor that upsets and undermines the ego, upsetting the psyche’s drive to maintain balance. While the narrator of “The Black Cat” claims that, “Of this spirit philosophy takes no account,” we shouldn’t assume Poe, himself a well-read guy with an obvious interest in philosophy, wasn’t influenced by thinkers who explored “one of the primitive impulses of the human heart,” namely, Aristotle and Augustine of Hippo. 

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle posits his theory of akrasia, or lack of self-restraint. It’s the inability to do the right thing even when you clearly know what the virtuous choice is. This is his correction to the Socratic-Platonic argument that to know the good is to do the good: no one willingly does evil. From this ethical perspective, people do bad things out of ignorance, so they just need to be morally re-educated, and they will no longer make bad choices. 

To Aristotle, though, this is a flawed, overly-idealistic view of the human condition. We can know theoretically what the virtuous choice is—wisdom Aristotle calls sophia—but that doesn’t automatically compel us to have phronesis, or practical wisdom, which is the ability to do the right thing. People can suffer from akrasia, a weakness of will, because there is a gap between knowledge and action, a notion that surfaces again in Aristotle’s Poetics. 

In his analysis of drama, Aristotle identifies hamartia as a key characteristic of the tragic hero, referring to the flaws in judgment that lead to a character’s ultimate downfall. An archery metaphor that means “to miss the mark,” hamartia becomes the main word New Testament writers used to translate the Jewish concept of “sin” into Greek (they weren’t the first to do this: writers of the Septuagint, the second century BCE Greek translation of Hebrew scripture, had already made this move). 

By the fifth century CE, Augustine of Hippo, the most influential Christian theologian of late-antiquity, formulated his doctrine of original sin, describing humanity’s lack of self-control as innate, embodied depravity. For Augustine, when Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they condemned all humans to bondage, chaining the spirit to this corrupt, uncontrollable, and ultimately decomposing flesh. Only Christ’s sacrifice and God’s loving grace, Augustine assures his fellow Christians, can liberate the spirit from this prison of sinfulness.

This is part of the philosophical lineage behind Poe’s idea of perversity. There is some truth to “The Black Cat” narrator’s claim that philosophers have not paid enough attention to it if seen from Poe’s mid-nineteenth century perspective. From Rene Descartes right through to John Locke, ‘Reason‘ was heralded as humanity’s salvation from the depravity of our brutish instincts. Of course, in the 18th century, David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were already poking holes in the claims about humanity’s divinely inspired rational powers.

Immanuel Kant managed to salvage some of the optimism, but had to sacrifice key epistemic conceits in the process. (See my essay on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for a more detailed analysis of this debate). In the wake of the French Revolution and the international traumas it spawned, enlightened confidence looked like hubris to the Romantic writers and artists of the early 19th century.

This was the mindset Poe resonated with: one that is highly skeptical of ‘Man-is-the-rational-animal’ claims. Anyone familiar with his biography can see why he gravitated toward a darker worldview. As a critic, he loved savaging fellow writers whose dispositions struck him as too sunny, and as a storyteller, he created C. Augustin Dupin, the forerunner to Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. By having Dupin use “ratiocination” to try and figure out the meaning behind bizarre and mysterious deaths, Poe invented the detective fiction genre. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, Dupin uses reason to resolve the mystery only to reveal a truly absurd culprit, suggesting that reason can only unravel so much. It can’t dispel the grotesque and perverse. 

The ‘spirit of perverseness’ implies that neither ‘Divine Grace’ nor humanistic ‘Reason’ can save us from a life of terror and suffering, especially when we ignore and repress our essential sinfulness. Whether you view history through a biblical or Darwinian lens, one thing is clear: humans aren’t naturally inclined to seek rational knowledge anymore than we are given to loving and respecting each other universally.

Cognitive science and evolutionary psychology have shown that the mind evolved to assist in feeding, procreating, and, of course, protecting the body from danger—not to seek objective truths. It evolved to help us band together in small tribal circles, fearing and even hating those who exist outside that circle. Over time we’ve been able to grasp how much better life would be if only we could rationally control ourselves and universally respect each other—and yet “in the teeth of our best judgment” we still can’t stop ourselves from committing vile and silly actions. 

Self-sabotage, Poe seems to argue, is our default setting. He shifted Gothic terror from foggy graveyards and ruined abbeys to broken brains and twisted minds. The true threats aren’t really lurking ‘out there.’ They’re stirring and bubbling within, perturbing and overwhelming the soul, often with horrifying results. 

A Gothic mind lives in a Gothicized world—personifying its surroundings in terms of its own anxious and alienated disposition, making what seems ‘evil’ appear as if it’s completely ‘out there’–an external threat. As literary and ecological theorist Timothy Morton points out, evil isn’t in the eye of the beholder. Evil is the eye of a beholder who frets over the corruption of the world without considering the perverseness generated by the way they are perceiving their surroundings. 

It’s an uroboric feedback loop that, left to its own devices, will spin out of control, crack, and crumble to pieces. The most disturbing implication of Gothic perversity is the sense of helplessness it evokes. Even when Poe’s characters are perceptive enough to diagnose themselves, they are incapable of stopping the mental glitches that keep generating the distorted view and vicious behaviors. This is how I interpret the narrator’s observations in “The Fall of the House of Usher:”

What was it…that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble…I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that …there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies…beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression…There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition…served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such…is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. 

I imagine that Mike Flanagan will be playing with this Gothic feedback loop of projected terrors and lurking horrors in his interpretation of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” presenting a host of characters who no doubt have to confront Poe’s “spirit of perversity.”

What are your thoughts on Poe’s idea of the inner trickster terrorizing us all? If you’re watching Flanagan’s adaptation of Poe, what are your impressions of his spin on Gothic perversity?