Poe repeatedly returns to the idea of consciousness surviving death, blurring the boundary between living and dead, between matter and spirit, threatening to collapse the subject’s perceptions and the objective world-in-itself. As such, we can read Poe’s fiction as aspiring to connect, through art, the supposedly unbridgeable gap between phenomena and noumena upon which Kant and his correlationist disciples so emphatically insist. In ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ (1845), one of his most famous stories, Poe again depicts a grotesque undead being, the eponymous tubercular Valdemar, dead and yet speaking, hypnotised by the narrator. Valdemar’s decomposing cadaver remains ‘alive’ and speaking in a paradoxical state between death and life. His speech itself is rendered repulsively physical, its syllables slimy: Poe describes it as impressing upon the auditory senses ‘as gelatinous or glutinous matters impress the sense of touch’, a mucilaginous synaesthesia, but also as moving beyond our full comprehension, ‘the hideous whole’ of this speech being decidedly ‘indescribable’, manifesting as if from a great distance.2 At the end of the tale, Valdemar finally collapses, rapidly rotting in the hands of the narrator into ‘a nearly liquid mass of loathsome – of detestable putrescence’ (p. 21), the quintessence of decay, in which the contradictory metaphysical states Valdemar embodies at last decompose into a putrid unity.
I am not the first, of course, to notice that stories like ‘Metzengerstein’ or ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ are disgusting. Adam Frank, in his discussion of Valdemar’s wagging tongue as a figure for the then-emerging technology of electromagnetic telegraphy (conveying, as it does, the impression of speech from a great distance, invested with a strange simultaneity), argues that Valdemar’s disgusting decomposition functions as part of a complicated joke on Poe’s part, using disgust in a kind of ‘decontamination script’ in which a struggle over the ‘purity’ of language is parodied by the power struggle between the mesmerist and Valdemar’s mesmerised corpse.3 My readings below certainly do not aim to overturn interpretations invested in Poe’s interests in technology, sociality and the writing process, such as Frank offers. Rather I want to claim that the aestheticised disgust in Poe’s writing does something else as well, something that later weird writers looking back to Poe would excitedly draw upon themselves. Disgust, in Poe’s writing, helps us to speculate about those things that otherwise lie beyond the borders of our thought, things that are ‘hideous beyond conception’.4 To read Poe’s proto-weird tales of premature burial, mesmerised corpses and death-in-life is to experience, however fleetingly, a kind of dissolution of the self brought about by aestheticised disgust.
Carolyn Korsmeyer argues in Savoring Disgust: The Foul & the Fair in Aesthetics (2011) that the disgusting in art exposes us to truths that are difficult to grasp, ‘existential truths’ whose magnitude ‘slips through the mind and cannot be held’, reminding us, for example, that ‘our corporeal selves will suffer disintegration and putrefaction’.5 Disgust serves in Poe’s tales as a means of thinking about concepts that are hard to comprehend or keep firmly in mind. Eugene Thacker, paraphrasing Quentin Meillassoux, argues that there are certain ideas that are difficult for philosophy to tackle, ideas that lie at the border of the unthinkable and so engender ‘a vicious cycle of logical paradox’.6 Following Meillassoux and his description of Kantian correlationism, Thacker specifically identifies the thought of the world-in-itself as an especially difficult idea to cognise which horror renders at least partially thinkable. It is precisely thoughts of the relation between the knowing subject and the non-human world that Poe’s horror fiction, with its disgust-provoking scenes, explores. In this way, Poe’s horror also responds to crises in philosophy – although, perhaps, unintentionally – specifically, as I will show, by conjuring through art what the German idealist Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling calls the Absolute.
Poe was clearly aware of both the revoltingness and the mystical qualities of his fiction. In a retort to a now lost letter from Thomas White, editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, who had evidently disapproved of certain aspects of Poe’s horrific story of mutilation and madness ‘Berenice’ (1835), Poe justifies his grotesque excesses in primarily commercial terms, but his defence of the tale also touches on the mystical. He notes that the antebellum reading public is hungry for horrors, and that while ‘Berenice’ may approach ‘the very verge of bad taste’, tales that tiptoe up to this line ‘are invariably sought after with avidity’. He characterises the ‘nature’ of such sought-after tales as ‘the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical’.7 Poe’s motivations for writing stories of horror and mysticism were at least significantly commercial, though as Sean McAlister observes, there is no reason ‘to continue viewing Poe’s authorial motivations as either exclusively artistic or exclusively mercenary’.8 The point here is that whether or not Poe was explicitly interested in exploring metaphysical ideas in his fiction, he understood that the reading public was fascinated both by the grotesque and by the ‘strange and mystical’ – that antebellum readers had an appetite for metaphysical horror. Judging from White’s later recrimination in the 1839 issue of Southern Literary Messenger, Poe’s tales were still perceived in close relation to ‘gloomy German mysticism’ years later with ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839). White insists that Poe is too inclined to ‘the relish of gross pleasures’, writing that Poe’s stories possess ‘great power’, but ultimately leave only a ‘painful and horrible impression’, and he warns Poe that to become ‘a useful and effective writer’ he must completely divorce himself ‘from that sombre school’ of Germanism.9 In his efforts to sell his fiction, Poe is clearly ready to draw on the vogue for horror, Germanism and the metaphysical.
We might expect, given the prominence of spectrality in the gothic tradition, for Poe’s fiction to draw on an essentially Cartesian metaphysics emphasising the duality of body and spirit – while certainly not all gothic texts are necessarily committed to such dualism, the implication of many conventional ghost stories is to imply the presence of immaterial substance. Such dualism, however, is neither the ontology of the gloomy German ‘mystics’ that White charges Poe with excessive attachment, nor the ontology born out in the stories themselves. From the flickering undead tongue and liquid putridity of Valdemar to the grotesque fusion of horse and man in ‘Metzengerstein’ to the monstrously embodied hauntings of ‘Morella’ and ‘Ligeia’, Poe’s stories trouble substance dualism rather than confirm it. In this chapter, I pursue the link between the disgusting and the metaphysical in Poe’s writing in relation to the philosophy of Schelling, who claimed that art is the ‘universal organon of philosophy’ and that it could thus truly represent that which philosophy could only abstractly describe at a remove.10 In obsessively returning to conceptions of personal and cosmic dissolution, a recurring ontological nightmare in which everything slides towards a hungry homogeneity, Poe’s tales enact the central drama of Schelling’s thought. This state of indifferentiation, in which all distinctions become meaningless, closely resembles what Schelling calls the ‘Absolute’ or ‘Absolute identity’, in which the differences between subject and object collapse to reveal a primal oneness. For Schelling, only art can reveal the Absolute: philosophy remains limited by the seeming division between consciousness and the world-in-itself, which only art uniquely collapses. Art thus works to undo the antinomy between phenomena and noumena identified by Kant as the basis for his ban on dogmatic metaphysics but understood by the German idealists as a problem to be solved.
Before beginning my analysis of Poe’s fiction, I first consider Poe’s familiarity with Schelling and recent scholarship that has considered Poe and Schelling together. I also discuss Poe’s aesthetic theories and metaphysical thinking to address possible