DJ Duk

November 11, 2007

The more things change...

I recently had a discussion about the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Not my favorite subject but an interesting one to pursue for a brief while. One of the things I noticed immediately after was a string of assumptions in my mind about how strange Poe himself was. He'd taken up in my imagination a strange personality that made him inscrutable to me. He couldn't possible be like the people I deal with every day. He lived so long ago. He wrote such strange stories. He must be quite unique. After all, this is the morbid mind that brought us such macabre tales as The Pit and the Pendulum, Murders in the Rue Morgue, and Masque of the Red Death. The same man who went mad and died mysteriously at the age of 40.

As I chased down that idea it seemed more and more ridiculous. Technologies change, languages change, but for the most part people remain the same. Poe may have died in 1849, but he should basically have been the same as anybody you might run into today.

To test the theory, was Poe the creepy darkness dwelling tormented genius so frequently portrayed or was he basically just some schmuck from Boston with some writing talent, research was in order. Research is hard work. Those who know DJDuk can already see where this is headed, but for the neophytes, no research was accomplished.

But I have an advantage. Having read so many different things near limitless stores of information lay in the murky bottom of my skull. Covered over, surely, in a wealth of the muck of misinformation, the slime of spurious notions, and the offal of anime trivia, but available to me, with after much diluvian mining. Two things dredged up from the depths of my cranium conspire to point out old Edgar as a fairly normal soul.

The first is that most of this writing about death and fear and the unknown occurred while Poe's young wife was getting about the business of dying of tuberculosis. Very much of Poe's writing can be seen as a conduit to express his various feelings at watching his wife daily cough up blood and be made weaker and weaker by an incurable disease. In this interpretation Poe is much less the master of the macabre, rather landing somewhere between Emo Kid and tortured soul. This is also well demonstrated by the humor that pervades much of his writing. It’s tough to think of Poe as a funny guy, but he wrote some tough in cheek stuff. Although you could argue his liberal use of puns could simply be interpreted as approaching horror from another angle.

The second is libel. Or maybe slander. After Poe died a literary rival with an axe to grind managed to gain control of the rights to his works. This rival conspired to write a biography of Poe that was officially published by his estate that makes old Ed look much more the monster than he was. Even some of the grimness of his works could be interpreted as blowing off steam in dealing with asshats like that. The false biography was widely circulated and made up the bulk of what was known about Poe-diddy for the better part of a century.

Posted by DjDuk at November 11, 2007 11:44 AM | TrackBack