Flight into Fancy: Poe's Discovery of the Right Brain

"Phrenology is no longer to be laughed at," Edgar Allan Poe wrote in an 1836 review of Phrenology, and the Moral Influence of Phrenology. "It is no longer laughed at by men of common understanding. It has assumed the majesty of science; and, as a science, ranks among the most important which can engage the attention of thinking beings" (Essays and Reviews 329). Poe, of course, counted himself among these "thinking beings" and continued to be engaged by phrenology, which located various "faculties" such as "amativeness" and "cautiousness" in different parts of the brain. In a letter written in 1841, for example, Poe says that his head "has been examined by several phrenologists" (Thomas 345). Indeed, Poe's interest in phrenology was probably behind his discussion of the mind in his critical writing and detective fiction. In "The Poetic Principle" he divides the mind into "the Pure Intellect, Taste, and the Moral Sense" (Essays and Reviews 272), and the narrator of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" speaks of "the old philosophy of the Bi-Part Soul" and of "a double Dupin--the creative and the resolvent" (Poetry and Tales 402).

What separates Poe from the phrenologists, who were right in conceiving of a divided brain but wrong in labeling its parts, is his keen understanding of a particular region of the mind. In a letter he wrote to Philip Pendleton Cooke in 1846, Poe says, "But, seriously, I do not think that any one so well enters into the poetical portion of my mind as yourself" (Quinn 514-515). Poe does not go on to say what he means by the "poetical portion" of his brain, but the rest of his writing contains several telling descriptions of an exotic region of the mind. These descriptions show that Poe correctly identified what modern neurologists call the right hemisphere of the brain, or simply the "right brain." That is, while he may not have pinpointed its location in the skull, Poe conceived of a mental region remote from ordinary consciousness and characterized by nonverbal forms of thought--specifically visual imagery, music, and emotion. He also understood that this region finds expression in dreams and in destructive urges.

The work that best illustrates Poe's awareness of the right brain is The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Here, as he had earlier in "MS. Found in a Bottle" and would later in "Landor's Cottage," Poe describes a journey into the mind and the discovery of an exotic region where language and other elements of ordinary consciousness give way to vivid, often surreal images, potent emotions, and destructive urges. Situated at the beginning of his most creative period--the period of "William Wilson," "Ligeia," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Raven," "Ulalume," and almost all of Poe's other masterworks--The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym thus provides a clue to the secret of the author's genius. In describing his discovery of the right brain, it reveals the source that he tapped to create his most imaginative work.

On first glance, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym seems merely another one of Poe's flights of fancy. A decade or so earlier, in poems such as "Dreams" and "Romance," he had expressed a longing for escape away from "dull reality" and into "forbidden things." As Henri Le Rennet and Edgar A. Perry, he actually had indulged this longing by leaving home and going briefly to sea. In Pym, it may seem, Poe simply donned another pseudonym and again "set boldly out to sea," this time on a wholly fictional journey. After all, the protagonist's identity with the author cannot be doubted; "Pym" is simply a compression of "pseudonym," and, as Kenneth Silverman points out, character and author share many similarities, including their names, families, and nativity in Massachusetts (135). Unlike Poe's earlier flights, however, this...