Despite his metaphysical speculations and intuitions in Eureka, Poe was, at times, rather cantankerous about metaphysics, and pokes fun at monist ontology in stories like ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’ (1838) when his narrator, Signora Psyche Zenobia, is advised by Mr Blackwood to adopt ‘the tone metaphysical’, and to ‘put in something about the supernal oneness’, while avoiding all mention of ‘the infernal twoness’. It is clear, though, that Poe is engaging as much in self-parody here as he is skewering other authors, when he writes of a supposedly model story of premature burial ‘full of taste, terror, sentiment, metaphysics, and erudition’.32 As Moreland and Shaw suggest, Poe’s ‘penchant for ambiguous parody’ makes his true feelings somewhat murky – insofar as he mocks Coleridge and his influences, he may well have been at pains to avoid being ‘perceived as an imitator of British writing’, and, in any event, ‘Poe notoriously evinces the greatest scorn for those writers from whom he has borrowed the most’. While various parodic and tonally ambiguous references to Schelling in Poe’s writing may vex Schellingian interpretations of Poe, his indebtedness to that ‘absurd metaphysician’, as Poe refers to Schelling in a cut reference that survives as a footnote in ‘Loss of Breath’ (1832), has been underestimated, especially insofar as Poe, like Schelling, rejects mechanistic materialism. Moreland and Shaw also point out that while Poe was keen at times to publicly repudiate German writers, his seeming annoyance with Germanism ‘does not seem to apply to Schelling’, and by 1839 at least had stopped being ‘the butt of Poe’s parodies and instead becomes praised as a critic’. Had Schelling read Poe’s fiction, they muse, he ‘would have found himself in the position of the narrator of “William Wilson”, unable to recognize his reflection, but unable to shake its haunting, and strangely familiar, aspect’.33
So far, I have pointed out a number of similarities between Schelling’s conception of the Absolute and Poe’s metaphysics, made a case for Poe’s familiarity with Schelling’s writing (in part through Coleridge) and suggested that Poe’s interest in using quasi-German idealist or ‘mystic’ elements in his fiction is linked to his understanding of the antebellum reading public’s desire for horrific, metaphysical fiction. I also want to suggest that while Poe may not have set out primarily to instil in his readers specific metaphysical insights, the idea that certain aesthetic encounters can help us to think about things which are otherwise difficult to cognise is not in itself incompatible with Poe’s famously anti- didactic critical theory.
Poe writes in the posthumously published essay ‘The Poetic Principle’ that ‘the demands of Truth are severe’ and that ‘all that which is so indispensable in Song, is precisely all that with which she has nothing whatever to do’.34 Poe argues that poetry is not well suited to articulating those forms of ‘Truth’ which arise from ‘the satisfaction of Reason’ (p. 6). However, Poe admits that both ‘the precepts of Duty’ and ‘the lessons of Truth’ can be introduced to a work of art ‘and with advantage’, provided that they do not subsume the ‘real essence’ of the poem (p. 8), and even this ‘real essence’ is described as more than appreciating ‘the Beauty before us’ (p. 7). Rather, Poe urges, art is inspired by ‘a wild effort to reach the Beauty above’, by ‘an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave’ and reflections on ‘eternity’ (p. 7). Art, for Poe, is excited by ‘our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and for ever, those divine and rapturous joys of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses’ (p. 7). Poe’s language, saturated with talk of souls, inner essences, immortality, eternity and the world beyond mundane existence, is all explicitly metaphysical. The poetic sentiment he describes is a longing to reach beyond the obvious sorts of beauties that simply appear before us, what we might call the beauties of mere phenomena and reach instead for a never-wholly-grasped beauty associated with aspects of reality outside our normal scope. But instead of drawing on the language and imagery of the sublime, as one might expect from Poe’s American transcendentalist contemporaries, Poe turns instead to the revolting and the deliquescent. His vertiginous approach to something like Schelling’s Absolute is propelled not through the sublime but through aesthetic encounters with disgust.
As recent affect theorists assert, disgust is often called on to police the boundaries of selfhood. Disgust is a peculiar, often unstable emotion – both profoundly embodied and, simultaneously, shaped by social forces. While its manifestations are varied and manifold, disgust is frequently tied to the transgression of boundaries, to liminal spaces such as bodily orifices and to processes of transformation such as death and decay. As Korsmeyer argues, disgust is ‘a response to the transition between life and death – to that which has recently died and is falling apart, to waste that was food and is now used up, to the mindless life-forms that invade and complete the process of disintegration’.35 In this she echoes Aurel Kolnai’s reading of putrefaction as the ‘prototypical object of disgust’, foremost of the nine principal types of disgust-elicitors that he delineates. For Kolnai all of the processes of putrefaction – ‘the corruption of living bodies, decomposition, dissolution, the odor of corpses’ and ‘in general the transition of the living into the state of death’ – constitute the epitome of disgust. Indeed, Kolnai argues that many other things which elicit disgust can ultimately trace the root of their revulsion back to the liminal state of ‘life in death’.36 He identifies disgust with life and vitality in the midst of death – for example, maggots writhing in a decomposing body, suffusing the cadaver with a ghastly post-mortem animation.
Colin McGinn’s recent ‘impure philosophy’ of disgust similarly claims putrescence as disgust’s master-trope, following Kolnai and extending his formulation into metaphysical territory. McGinn suggests that disgust always ‘proceeds from an oxymoron, a kind of collision or clash of categories’ – most saliently from ‘the friction between two of the categories most central to our conceptual scheme as self-conscious animals’, namely ‘Life and Death’. As he argues:
When these resounding categories refuse to stay separate, but merge together, disgust floods in… We fear and shun death and we embrace and celebrate life, but when the two come together, or are hard to tell apart, our reaction is to turn away in disgust – as if we wish to remain ignorant of the fact of interpenetration. We feel positive about the life that throbs even within putrefying flesh, but the heavy weight of negative affect concerning death robs that positive feeling of its usual value: we are torn, conflicted, confused… the astonishing force of life impresses us, but the terrible inevitability of death dampens and depresses. Putrefaction, as disgust paradigm, transparently combines both: the vital and the nullifying.37
The ‘death-in-life’ theory synthesises several previously unsatisfactory accounts of disgust and is ‘closely bound up with ideas of consciousness and its annihilation’. Disgust is thus a pre-eminently ‘metaphysical emotion, spanning the divide between (roughly) mind and matter’. Our stubborn materiality, the brute fact of our bodily functions, exists in tension with our consciousness and our aspirations for transcendence. Because we are ‘both clean and unclean, superlative and sordid’, this insoluble union of body and spirit generates a kind of metaphysical and aesthetic shock – a constant surprise that our consciousness is tied so intimately to our decaying, mortal, animal bodies. As McGinn