Whose/Who’s Ligeia?

Whose/Who’s Ligeia? R. C. DE PROSPO I’ll tell you what the soul is made of: More dust. Behind each harrow In each field A plume takes to the wind. The farmers, At last, Are freeing themselves By setting free the soil. James Galvin, “Fragments Written While Traveling through a Midwestern Heat Wave” (1997) D ead women’s bodies litter Poe’s writing. Laughter? Shudders? Theorizing gender frees female and male from somatic determination for semiotic freeplay. Of course this is real work, of course a lot more work is still to be done. But I want here to leap over the theorizing of gender to the theorizing of the theorizing of gender—to make a problem not of gender within human being but of human being within which gender is differentiated. This puts into question not that most traditional of binary oppositions within human being, at least not directly, but human being, itself, the grand hypostatizing that grounds all the sciences of man. And this requires positing an Other whose semiotic companionship with human being would be analogous to that of female and male within human being. Now, when “posthuman” is increasingly being thrown around in articles in PMLA, and Microsoft’s Jaron Lanier, the first contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s recent forum on “the defining idea of the next decade,” replies “The End of Human Specialness,”1 can a different reading of Poe’s “Ligeia” help to conceive an other-than-human being, an entity within which the differentiation between two genders might C  2012 Washington State University P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 44, 2011 57 R. C . D E P R O S P O be made to seem—in service, mind, to advancing the theorizing of gender— trivial? Readers of Poe, from the uninitiated who titter and gawk at the dead women to the hyperinitiated who were solemn about the dead women even long before such gynophobe massacres as the latest one in Pittsburgh in 2009, and the many notorious older ones such as those in Kildeen, Texas, and in Montreal, all assume Poe’s métier to be the familiar romantic one. Suppose it’s not. Suppose Ligeia’s alienation signifies a difference that is vaster, and more debilitating, than what makes the world go ‘round. Ligeia is dead to the narrator from the outset, before she actually dies. This is well known, long known, for example, by D. H. Lawrence. What isn’t well known at all is that her “strangeness,” the quality that is by definition undefinable, and that the narrator makes redundantly, and in a variety of contexts, even stranger by quoting it from a little-known passage on the unknowable from Bacon, might best be understood not as interpersonal but as metaphysical, onto-theological. And I’m supposing here the possibility, maybe even the necessity, of a strangeness that is other than just the unstable, unhappy, self-deluded, -mystified, -repressive moment in the realization of the self. Erinnerung is powerful enough ultimately to sublate [aufheben] all manner of negation—forgetfulness, un-knowing, aporia—and so the narrator of “Ligeia” can easily be conceived, is in fact perennially conceived, as somehow positively, erotically, displacing the usual, or at least the usually desired, consequences of intimacy. Or rather I should say (recall the couple’s extravagant devotions, preternatural suitabilities), super-intimacy, super-connubial twinship, hyper-propinquity, the very hyperbole of desire itself, which the story frustrates with a relentlessness that is equal and opposite to the intensity of the narrator’s attentions; he can’t recall the quotidia of their acquaintance (“I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where”), can’t recall her last name (“I have never known the paternal name of her”), can’t capture her “expression” (“Ah, word of no meaning! behind whose vast latitude of mere sound we entrench our ignorance of so much of the spiritual”) (Works, 2:310, 311, 313). Can’t, can’t, can’t. Can any of us, can modern humanist readers, resist the urge to repair the narrator’s forgetfulness with various dazzling counteracts of a-letheia —the unforgetting...