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Cruising(Perversely)forContext Poe and Murder, Women and Apes Leland S. Person InhissecondreviewofHawthorne’sTwice-ToldTales,Poefamouslyprescribesthe ideal strategy for the “skilful literary artist,” who constructs a tale by conceiving, “with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect” and “then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect.” As Poe elaborates this deterministic artistic paradigm, he declares that in the “whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design” (572). In emphasizing the writer’s “deliberate care” and intense focus on producing a predetermined “effect,” Poe seeks control over both the creative process and the reader. As he says, “during the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control” (572). Or as James Machor concludes, “Poe’s entire concept of effect and his privileging of it as ‘indispensable ’ to the brief tale were undergirded by the assumption in informed response that the successful author would be a virtual enchanter who controlled the audience with his or her spellbinding artistic performance” (“Mastering,” 169). In Machor’s view, Poe approached the writer-reader relationship as a “virtual battle for authority, waged as both frontal assault and guerilla warfare” (172). Poe’s view of the writer-reader relationship, as he articulates it in this review, seems almost axiomatic, so it is intriguing to examine a later statement in the Hawthorne review, where Poe seems to give the reader a more creative role— one that anticipates Roland Barthes’s concept of the “writerly text” (5). In this reading experience, the reader’s soul or mind is not controlled by the writer but participates in the creative process as a kind of co-author. In fact, this shared process seems to produce a higher form of art—what Poe paradoxically calls “true originality.” [T]he true originality—true in respect of its purposes—is that which, in bringing out the half-formed, the reluctant, or the unexpressed fancies of mankind, or in exciting the more delicate pulses of the heart’s passion, or in giving birth to 143 144 | Leland S. Person some universal sentiment or instinct in embryo, thus combines with the pleasurable effect of apparent novelty, a real egotistic delight. The reader, in the case first supposed (that of the absolute novelty,) is excited, but embarrassed, disturbed, in some degree even pained at his own want of perception, at his own folly in not having himself hit upon the idea. In the second case, his pleasure is doubled. He is filled with an intrinsic and extrinsic delight. He feels and intensely enjoys the seeming novelty of the thought, enjoys it as really novel, as absolutely original with the writer—and himself. They two, he fancies, have, alone of all men, thought thus. They two have, together, created this thing. Henceforward there is a bond of sympathy between them, a sympathy which irradiates every subsequent page of the book. (“Nathaniel Hawthorne,” 581) Of course, if we read carefully, we notice that this feeling of sympathy is only something that the reader “fancies.” This is part of Poe’s intention. He does not really cede control of the reader’s mind or soul. He only seems to do so. He is the master illusionist. The reader contributes to the reading that the author has been aiming at from the beginning. As Machor puts it, “Poe defined this intimate bond with the reader by taking away as much as he gave”; the reader was “induced to feel a bond of achievement that remained an illusion, staged by the writer who has kept the true nature of the accomplishment—the wires controlling the scene—hidden behind the curtain of his or her craft” (“Mastering,” 174). What’s a reader to do? Poe always seems one step ahead of us. Even when we think we are producing meaning, he has anticipated the moves we make. I want to explore the work of reading Poe, especially reading Poe historically and bifocally in relation to both the context in which he wrote and the context that motivates our reading and re-reading of his tales. We have been historicizing Poe like mad in recent years, exemplified especially in books by Terence Whalen and Jonathan Elmer, essays by Joan Dayan, Leslie Ginsberg, Teresa Goddu, and others, and in two collections, The Ameri­ can Face of Edgar Allan Poe and Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race. Not...

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