Movements in the Hollow Coffin: On “The Fall of the House of Usher”

Movements in the Hollow Coffin: On “The Fall of the House of Usher” MARK STEVEN A n irrational belief that the dead may return to haunt the living is part of “the uncanny,” a psychical phenomenon whose theory Sigmund Freud adapts (from Ernst Jentsch) to describe “the perceptible reanimation of something familiar that has been repressed.” “The writer,” Freud argues, brings us “in relation to spirits, demons, and ghosts” by “not letting us know whether he is taking us into the real world or into a purely fantastic one of his own creation.”1 If psychoanalytic theory holds that literature is manifestly a haunted medium, then perhaps a productive intersection could be staged between Freud’s uncanny and Jacques Derrida’s “hauntology”— between psychical phenomena and a critical program that “supplants its nearhomonym ontology, replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive.”2 The literary figure of this conjunction would best be described as “undead”—and, by reading an exemplarily haunted work of literature with these two theories in mind, I want to propose some ideas for what I am going to call “the undeath of the author.” To begin with a concession: Edgar Allan Poe is done to death. While the flesh-and-blood Poe met his physical end over 160 years ago—done in by either alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, suicide, or tuberculosis—similarly myriad scholars have dissected his literary corpus with all the critical tools provided them, and by doing so they have turned out a variety of different Poes. Scott Peeples describes a handful in the preface to his indispensible Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe (2004): “the romantic Southern outcast, the patron saint of the French symbolists, the hack, the test case for Freudian psychoanlysis, the proto-deconstructionist, the racist, the antiracist , and so on.”3 Achieving metaphorical quintessence, then, a profusion of that scholarship has been deeply indebted to Roland Barthes’s seminal essay “Death of the Author” (1967). Within this context, the most famous work to be influenced by Barthes—Joseph Riddel’s 1979 essay “The ‘Crypt’ of Edgar Poe”—argues that, in Poe’s tales, “images of nature are already metonymic substitutions for words—or substitutions for substitutions,” and that Poe’s “realm of dreams” is in fact the “realm of language.”4 It is thus that Poe has C  2012 Washington State University P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 44, 2011 5 M A R K S T E V E N been done to death, and in at least three ways—his body was obliterated; critical overkill carved up the oeuvre; and, finally, Barthes decoupled the author from his text, burying the remnants of that authorial corpse far from the fruits of its lost lifeblood. However, and instead of warranting critical abandonment or occluding lively scholarship, I believe this manifold of death might be productive insofar as it situates Poe as a barometer by which to gauge the vicissitudes of a deadly trend in literary criticism. That will be the task of this essay, to follow Poe into (and back out of) his theoretical hereafter. I want to make good on all these morbid metaphors and dovetail Poe’s critical afterlife with the form and narrative of one of his tales—“The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839)—which I read not only as the story of Madeline Usher’s return from the grave but also as a formal and emplotted rendition of Poe’s authorial undeath. My argument has three points: that literary criticism has sealed the dead author within a crypt below his own text, thereby disarticulating Poe from “The House of Usher” and making possible certain readings that his presence would otherwise preclude; that, in spite of this, the authorial Poe remains encrypted within the construction of his prose; and, lastly, that it is through the effect this prose has on the reader that an undead Poe might return to his tale. It will be my contention that, although autobiographical information about an author is not enough to warrant the censure...