A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832-1937. Jonathan Newell

brings to mind a living corpse, already wasting away, and thus invites particularly powerful disgust. Again, as McGinn claims, the collision between life and death underlies much if not all of what we consider disgusting: ‘disgust occupies a borderline space, a region of uncertainty and ambivalence, where life and death meet and merge’. Roderick, with his thinness and pallor, his fungous-cobweb hair like a post-mortem growth, his ‘cadaverousness’ and wasting illness, exemplifies this borderline space. If, as McGinn claims, ‘the proper object of disgust is really a process’ – specifically ‘the process of putrefaction’ – then the slow process of Roderick’s decline can be understood as the quintessence of the disgusting.⁵⁹ As in Schelling’s much vaunted tragedy, we see a ‘representation of unity that is marked… by strife, contradiction, and incompleteness’, here represented through the repulsive processes of putrefaction invading the living body of Roderick Usher.⁶⁰

      Like her sibling, Lady Madeline Usher is a figure of decomposition and living death, a doppelgänger of her brother wracked with ‘a settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequently through transient affections of a partially cataleptical character’ (p. 83). Even more so than Roderick she is marked as an embodiment of death-in-life: like the diseased, undead brides of ‘Morella’ and ‘Ligeia’ she is a revenant, literally returning from the grave (where she may well have been prematurely buried). But even before she is interred she is presented in a ‘region of horror’ and inspires a mixture of awe and revulsion (p. 86). Poe writes of ‘the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face’ and of a ‘suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death’ (p. 86), both suggesting a blurring of life and death, the ‘process of transition… where the two poles of the transition are life and death’ that McGinn stresses as the essential elicitor of disgust. The signs of life lingering around Madeline suggest what McGinn would call ‘a moment of deep metaphysical transition’ as life and death are ‘paradoxically unified’ such that it seems as if ‘the consciously living is still hovering around the organically dead’.⁶¹ The state of uncertainty clouding Madeline’s actual decease only compounds this moment of horror and disgust. Her ‘striking similitude’ (p. 86) to her brother is emphasised by the narrator; house, brother and sister thus emerge as part of putrid troika, an amalgam that further includes the disease(s) afflicting the siblings and the aesthetic objects Roderick uses to soothe his condition. This similarity again points to the underlying unity of the house/House of Usher – their ‘shared soul’, to use Lovecraft’s term.⁶²

      All of this interpenetration of the organic and the inorganic erodes boundaries between consciousness and world, calling the sanctity and stability of the human subject into question and replacing it with the amorphous ontology of the Absolute. Roderick himself seems to endorse a panpsychic ontology affording the non-human a peculiar agency, insisting on ‘the sentience of all vegetable things’ and arguing that the ‘grey stones of the home of his forefathers… in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around them’ and ‘above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of the arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn’ are evidence of the estate’s sentience, which possesses a ‘silent yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and which had made him… what he was’ (p. 85). The malign power of objects to affect the human subject extends to the collection of artworks that Roderick treasures; these are said to literally form ‘no small portion of the mental existence of the invalid’ (p. 85). We are told throughout the story that Roderick’s malady relates to a hypersensitivity to sensation: ‘he suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses’ (p. 83). Roderick cultivates peculiar aesthetic fascinations in order to soothe his frayed nerves, yet even these efforts cast a kind of ‘sulphurous lustre’ (p. 84) over everything, suggesting both a rancid smell and the fires of hell.

      Roderick’s artistic fixations lead us back towards the entwinement of affect, metaphysics and horror, as if modelling the aesthetics of Poe’s horror fiction. The narrator’s aesthetic experiences with the artworks that Roderick adores emphasise the futility of action in the face of a mind imprisoned by the inevitability of entropy – ‘a mind from which darkness, as if an inherently positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom’ (p. 84). We are told that ‘if ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher’, his abstract paintings evoking ‘an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which [the narrator] had felt ever yet in the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuseli’ (p. 84). The metaphysical imagery here suggests a cosmos of endless gloom, while the strangely ‘positive’ darkness suggests a negation so utter it becomes corporeal. As Thacker writes in his consideration of the mysticism of darkness through philosophers ranging from Dionysus the Areopagite to Georges Bataille, ‘positive’ darkness – darkness not as an absence of light but as a presence of its own – can be understood as darkening the human, working ‘to undo the human by paradoxically revealing the shadows and nothingness at its core, to move not towards a renewed knowledge of the human, but towards something we can only call an unknowing of the human, or really, the unhuman’.⁶³ The text’s aesthetics of infernal gloom and decay couple with the nauseous erosion of boundaries between self and other, house and family.

      Awe mingles with disgust in the most noteworthy of Roderick’s aesthetic obsessions, ‘The Haunted Palace’, which like ‘The Conqueror Worm’ of ‘Ligeia’ was published independently of the short story in which it is embedded. Jonathan Cook argues that the poem ‘provides a poetic abstract of the collapse of Usher’s mental and physical worlds’ and suggests that ‘The Haunted Palace’ invites a view of ‘the human body as a microcosmic view of the universe’.⁶⁴ The poem is a narrative of collapse – specifically, the collapse of consciousness. It stages a confrontation between the aesthetics of beauty and horror, between reification of the subject’s transcendental excellence exalting rationality and the monstrous Absolute. The imagery of the poem mirrors this confrontation, turning from bucolic and heavenly to necrotic and hellish. Beginning with a depiction of ‘the monarch Thought’s dominion’ as ‘a fair and stately palace’ (p. 84) surrounded by green valleys and protected by angels, the poem interrupts its Neoplatonic idyll with the presence of ‘evil things, in robes of sorrow’ assailing Thought’s estate, replacing the celestial figures glimpsed in its now ‘red-litten windows’ with ‘Vast forms that move fantastically/To a discordant melody’ (p. 85). The antagonists of thought are rendered as grotesque agents of decay and malignancy, forming a ‘hideous wrong’ that resembles ‘a rapid ghastly river’ (p. 85): homogenous and multitudinous, their incursion undermines the supremacy of the subject, suggesting a cosmic pessimism in which transcendence is refused and the inevitability of entropy is affirmed. Even the simile of the river suggests ontological fluidity while also bringing to mind the river Styx and thus the transition between life and death. ‘The Haunted Palace’ uses the trope of usurpation and the collapse of a kingdom to represent the supremacy of indifferentiation, a noetic abyss that swallows up any delusion of the human subject’s ascendency. In this sense the poem – like ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ as a whole – inverts the Kantian sublime, its glorification of the subject and its entrenchment of a two-worlds metaphysics, of the division between subject and world. And like ‘The Conqueror Worm’, the poem reveals something deeper than the rest of the (prose) story discloses: in this case ‘the tottering of [Usher’s] lofty reason upon her throne’ (p. 84), the fragility of the human mind as Usher flirts precipitously with madness and non-being. Any pretence of self-aggrandisement or transcendental mastery of the sort imagined by Kant is dashed to pieces by ‘The Haunted Palace’.