Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales by G. R. Thompson (review)

REVIEWS Thompson, G. R. Foes Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales. Madison: U. of Wisconsin Press, 1973. 254 pp. Cloth: $12.50. This carefully documented and closely reasoned study weaves the comic and Gothic strands of Poe's fiction into a unified and coherent fabric. More immediately, it offers serious readers a sound and sensible alternative to the arguments of interpreters such as Richard Wilbur and Joseph J. Moldenhauer. My suspicion is that their assertions that Poe celebrated death, even perceived"murder as a fine art," have hadtoo great an influence on recent thought and criticism. How many teachers have caught quizzical looks on the faces of undergraduates presented with the reading of Eureka as a celebration, or tested Moldenhauer's arguments in light of the morbidity of Charles Manson's atrocities? Concluding that Poe was consistently the skeptic, Thompson argues that "the 'effect' aimed at in Eureka is an almost mystical, poetic perception of and simultaneous transcendence of the absurd hoax of individual existence" (p. 195), the hoax being "the appalling possibility of void at the bottom of existence" (p. 191) . Contrast this to the views of Wilbur and Moldenhauer that through death the poet (madman, murderer, suicide) transcends the mundane to rediscover primal unity, God. Thompson sees equally tragic and ironic assertions informing Pym (1838-39) and "The Colloquy of Monos and Una" (1841). Out of this essentially dark vision emerges Poe's ironic stance, "a psychological way of avoidingspiritual self-destruction bylaughing at the sources of one's own despair" (p. 139). If, for Poe's heroes and narrators, for mankind, the universe is deceptive, perverse, absurd (God's "gigantic hoax" on man), the mind can transcendonly by contrasting and balancing man's ill-fortune with a comic, satiric, or ironic perception. The point is not that of Poe's sixty-eight tales, thirty-three are obviously comic and thirty-five serious. The central thesis tested is that the serious or Gothic fictions possess "satiric and comic elements thematically related to the macabre elements, . . . [possess] a kind of ambivalent mockery" (p. 14). By virtue of their ironic elements theGothic tales are of the same cloth as the comic fictions, that is, are articulations of the same dark and ironic Romantic vision. Individual annihilation is the only certitude, however intensely Poe's characters may yearn for ultimate knowledge beyond death. The truly Gothic dimension of the fiction is the mockery of such an absurd universe by means of irony and hoax. Poe employs the grotesque and arabesque (distinct but strongly similar modes) to merge the "ironic opposites" in transcendent vision. Viewed from this perspective, the early Gothic piece "Metzengerstein" is a satire on the established conventions of English and American Gothic writing. "The Philosophy of Furniture" becomes a biting joke on "decorist" theory. "The Assignation" is a "synecdoche of . . . serio-comic, ironic ambivalence." Dramatic irony in "The Oval Portrait" is aimed at the naive reader seeking conventional Gothic entertainment . And a piece such as "Valdemar," playing to and on the period's taste for pseudoscience , is a hoax on the occult tale. 104Reviews Skepticism, despair over man's ability to penetrate objective reality, or even comprehend his own mind, informs masterworks such as "Ligeia" and "Usher." While displaying stunning linear logic, Poe's narrators are "capable of gross misperception, unreal construction, and instant irrationality" (p. 103). And the Gothic lighting and interior decor, frequently judged tawdry and melodramatic, are weird, but from Thompson's angle of vision also objective correlatives of tormented minds. This study will also be welcomed by intellectual and literary historians. Poe is directly linked to the German Romantic Ironists, especially Ludwig Tieck and August Wilhelm Schlegel. Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (first translated into English in 1815) alone joined Romantic melancholy with the ironic and comic. And, for a period, German Romanticism pointed the way "toward an ultimate harmony involving a unification of opposites, an annihilation of apparent contradictions and earthly limitations, and a merging of the subjective human personality and objective rational understanding into a penetrating view ofexistence from the height ofthe ideal—butalways with an eye to the terrors of an ultimately incomprehensible, disconnected, absurd, probably decaying, and...