“Berenice” and the Art of Incorporative Exclusion

WilliamFreedman “Berenice”and the Art of IncorporativeExclusion In the same year that R. C. De Prospo, surveying recent Poe criticism,identified Poe as “oneof the Americanwritersmost likely to inspiredeconstruction ,”’ MichaelJ. S. Williams brought “Berenice” into the ever unfolding fold with the observation that “thenarrative ...implies that the search for a pre- or extratextual ‘reality’is doomed to frustration .” “Egaeus’splight,” he remarks, “is that he is born into a ... ‘world-as-text’in which the arbitrary nature of language precludes significationof the transcendental,which is infinitelydisplacedby chains of signifiers.Hisobsessionwith and seizure of Berenice’steeth isPoe’sironic comment on any attempt to possess the symbol and so gain access to the realm of the ideal.”2Williams’sreading is persuasive, but the source and nature of the tale’s denturelike elusiveness cannot, I think, be fully grasped without assistance from a gendered readingthat takesnote of Poe’sunresolvedambivalence towardwoman and her place in the realm or work of art. As Elisabeth Bronfen suggests, in an insight inspired by “TheOval Portrait”but applicableelsewhere , “[tlhe woman, representative of natural materiality, simultaneouslyfigures as an aesthetic risk,asa presence endangering the artwork,sothat as the portrait’s double she must be rem~ved.”~ Removed and yet incorporated. Dead and yet, as the artist reportedly observes, the “Lijii of the painting for which she has died (Compkte Works, 4:249). And that is at once the problem and the point. Since the idealized beautiful woman in Poe is equivalent to the Beauty of Poetry (perhaps of all art, including the prose that ostensibly strives for Truth),while actual fleshlywoman represents the corporeality, decay, and death that threaten the insulating aesthetic enterprise, the ambivalence toward woman articulated by J. Gerald Kennedy and Jacqueline Doyle and conflated in the closingpages of “Ligeia”translates into an unresolved struggle between the ethereally idealized work of art and a harder reality’s drive to invade it? It is this conflict, this ambivalence about the place of corporeal reality in the work of art, that “Berenice”and other talesself-reflexivelyenact and describe. Just as the multiple and contradictory meanings and implications of the elusive teeth cannot be grasped without prior reference to the woman from whose mouth they are wildly extracted , so the indeterminacy of “Berenice” cannot be understood without reference to Poe’ssense of the dual nature of woman and his unresolved ambivalencetoward her and her place in the work and world of art. A number of readers have commented on what the tale makes manifest:the identification of the library to which Egaeus is hermetically confined with the narrator’s mind or consciousness and with the literary text itself.5Because Egaeus inhabits his library/consciousness both as reader and as text, his narrative is all but inevitably selfreflexive . “Berenice,”then, is one of a number of Poe’s tales that allegorize their own entangling struggle with a reality Poe’sart would exclude but must finallyaccommodate. More particularly and involutedly,it isthe tale of its ownmakingand technique , the tale of fiction’seffort to exclude, transform , neutralize, and finallyreincorporate the forbidden knowledge that worms its way into the mind/chamber/text of Poe’s fictions. The central narrative quest of “Berenice” is for the retrievalof “aremembrance whichwill not be excluded” (CompbteWorks,2:17),and the phrasing is expressive of the struggle. Poe’s narrators, Egaeusamong them, typicallyproclaim themselves “Berenice and IncorporativeExclusion 69 relentlessseekersafter truth, but the impulsethey betray is lessfor discoverythan for exclusion.The apostrophe to Berenice’s matchless sylphlike beauty ends abruptly:“andthen-then all is mystery and terror, and a tale which should not be told.”The remembrance that inflicts itself on the besieged narrator would be excluded. Egaeus would erase the memoryand banish the tale as he would exclude Berenice from his cloister, sexual and emotional passion from his experience. If banishment fails, if tale and recollection compel awareness,theywill be clouded in vagueness and mystery and sealedstiflinglybetween the wallsof a selfconsciousand unyielding fiction. That “all is mystery and terror” does not surprise us; we are accustomed to thejuxtaposition and understand the link. But Poe’sargumentsfor maximizingterror through vaguenessand ambiguityare not convincing . Mystery is not, as he employs it, terror’s handmaid but a cloak to obscure its hideousness and...