Posts Tagged Edgar Allan Poe

As an uninformed but opinionated teenager working my way through both youth group and Honors World History, I grew obsessed with the Fall of the Roman Empire. I must confess that my interest in the subject did not drive me to any book beyond the text for my ninth grade social-studies course (and given my grade in that class, I doubt I read even that book very closely). No, I was interested in a sort of spiritual Roman Empire; I knew it was big, and evil, and anti-Christian, and I had the vague notion that its downfall was caused by orgies, human sacrifices, an influx of foreigners, and steep tax hikes. Naturally, I loudly declared the United States to be the “New Rome.” (My politics, let us say, have changed dramatically in the intervening decade and a half; to the degree that I see in my country a belligerent and doomed Colossus, it is for different reasons altogether.) A budding songwriter, I even wrote an alternative-rock number that made the case for the similarities. I can remember only the chorus:

Rome Rome Rome Rome Rome Rome Rome Rome
Rome Rome Rome Rome Rome
Rome Rome Rome Rome Rome Rome Rome Rome
Rome Rome Rome Rome Rome

With a silver tongue like that, how could I fail to convince everyone who heard me? Fortunately, no one did; I grew up before the ascent of the Internet and the availability of affordable home-recording software, so this song and the many others I wrote in high school are not living off in the ether somewhere. (Including, thank God, one called “Planet Dramamine”–and yes, the chorus was, “You all make me sick.”)

What I didn’t realize at the time was that the founders of this country very self-consciously looked to Rome as a model for their fledgling republic. And why not? Education in the eighteenth century followed the classical model, so future statesmen like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson learned Latin at an early age (an early age according to our lowered modern expectations) and took to heart the lessons of Cicero, Virgil, Horace, and the other giants of Roman letters. Madison and Jefferson–along with John Adams, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the other educated founding fathers–entered adulthood valorizing the heroes of the Roman Republic. When the American colonies revolted against their “tyrant” motherland in the 1760s and ’70s, the colonial leaders almost certainly saw themselves as contemporary Catos and Bruti, risking their lives for the good of the republic. America was indeed the “New Rome,” and not at all in the way I thought when I was fourteen.

All of this is well-documented elsewhere. What I’m interested in, for the sake of this post anyway, is the way the “New Rome” mentality translated itself into American cultural and literary life. For all of its mighty accomplishments in the realms of politics and imperial victories, Roman literature was doomed to lag behind the Greeks whom they so admired. Even the Roman gods were Greek deities with different names and (sometimes) a fresh coat of paint; it’s no wonder that the first important Roman literary figures are playwrights like Plautus and Terence, who borrow their plots wholesale from Greek dramatists. Likewise, the two most important Roman philosophers before the common era are Lucretius and Cicero, and even they are philosophers the way that Malcolm Gladwell is a sociologist–in other words, they’re far better at accumulating the thoughts of Epicurus and Plato than in coming up with their own.

Lucretius and Cicero both felt the Roman/Greek divide strongly. Lucretius in particular is wildly dissatisfied with Roman culture and with the Latin language; he can’t even satisfactorily present the ideas of Epicurus, he complains, because when compared to Greek, Latin is the language of a toddler:

Nor does it fail me that discoveries–obscure and dark–
Of Greeks are difficult to shed much light on with the spark
Of Latin poetry, chiefly since I must coin much new
Terminology, because of our tongue’s dearth and due
To the novelty of subject matter.
(The Nature of Things I.135-139)

Later, he will have to use a Greek term “Due to the dearth of our mother tongue” (I.831). Lucretius’ frustration with Latin as a language bubbles up from time to time in The Nature of Things–exacerbated, no doubt, by his admiration of Epicurus as a thinker.

Indeed, the Roman linguistic inferiority complex is inextricably linked to the Roman cultural inferiority complex. Rome was unsatisfactory as a producer of art and philosophy–or at least it seemed that way to its more high-minded citizens. Cicero, for example, who turned to philosophy after being repeatedly disappointed by politics, seems largely ashamed of the intellectual achievements of his countrymen. Even when he points to famous Romans like Cato or Laelius as examples of men to emulate, he praises them for their resemblance to the Greek model. Thus, in On Old Age, Cato admires Titus for his Greekness: “For I know you are a moderate, even-tempered man–who has imported more than just your surname from Athens! You have brought back a civilized, intelligent point of view as well.” Rome has become a cultural Third World, thirsty for colonists from Greece. (Cato also refers sneeringly to a man who is “for a Roman, very well read”; Cicero at this stage is clearly a man with little respect for his fellow citizens–and for good reason.)

And yet even in Cicero’s work we see the line of quality between Greek and Latin literature break down a bit. Less than a decade after Lucretius complained of having to import Greek words to cover the holes in Latin, Cicero has one of the speakers in The Nature of the Gods admit that

A number of people who were familiar with Greek culture could not previously communicate what they had learnt to their fellow-citizens because they did not feel able to express in Latin what they had studied in Greek. But in this field we now seem to have made such progress that in vocabulary at least we were on equal terms.

Latin had arrived as a language, and if Roman culture still lagged behind, it was at least on its way. Cicero wrote The Nature of the Gods in 45 B.C.E.; Rome was at that time only 26 years–a single generation–away from its greatest literary achievement. I speak, of course, of The Aeneid.

National literatures, according to the conventional wisdom, require national epics. These mixes of poetry, fiction, history, and mythology allow cultures to place themselves in a more global sense of time, purpose, and spirituality. Fittingly, The Aeneid, Rome’s great epic, feeds off The Iliad and The Odyssey the way Terence and Plautus feed off their Greek sources. But (largely) unlike Terence and Plautus, Virgil pushes things forward; his poem begins as a spinoff of Homer but becomes something dazzlingly original, something that (again, largely) kills Rome’s cultural inferiority complex.

Early American culture was defined, like Rome’s, by its anxiety standing next to that of other nations. I am speaking here of the early nineteenth century; the Puritans were less concerned with their literary output than with the state of their souls, and–excepting potboilers like Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple–the colonial and revolutionary eras mostly produced political tracts and poetry that has largely been forgotten. But once the fledgling nation had gained its political independence, its citizens began to crave a cultural independence.

Unlike the Romans of Cicero’s day, nineteenth-century Americans could not blame their cultural deficiencies on the weaknesses of the language. The British had, after all, produced Shakespeare and Milton using the English language; the former colonies had thus far come up only with Anne Bradstreet and Philip Freneu–neither writer without his or her charms, but nether even coming close to the achievements of the English Renaissance.

The canonical writers of the time tended to look across the Atlantic for inspiration. Many of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, for example, are set in Germany or France, and virtually none of his best and most famous tales explicitly take place in America. (One exception is “The Gold-Bug,” the first story one encounters when moving from those Poe stories known by all educated Americans to those known chiefly by scholars and specialists.) Or take Washington Irving’s Sketch-Book, fully half of which takes place in Great Britain. Even Irving’s stories that strike our ears as deeply and resonantly American–I refer, of course, to “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”–are virtual retellings of Dutch folktales, effectively transplanted into New York State.

The most unapologetically American of American writers in this era was James Fenimore Cooper–and his popularity outraced his actual talent exponentially. The literary journals of the time, especially the North American Review, issued periodic calls for an American literary messiah, a writer who could eliminate the qualitative distance between American and European letters.

Those calls continued into the period we know as the American Renaissance. Most famously, Ralph Waldo Emerson–a writer of skill and some originality but not, let us admit, of genius–called in 1843 for an American poet who would save American culture from the morass in which it found itself. “I look in vain,” he says, “for the poet whom I describe. We do not, with sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves to life, nor dare we chaunt our own times and social circumstance.” This new American poet, then, must break with the past; he must sing America in its glories and heartbreaks, and he must do so, if not in a new language, as Virgil did, then at least in a new diction.

America has never really had a national epic poem, largely because the novel had supplanted the most as the most popular and effective literary genre by the time the colonies became a nation. (Thus, one used to hear about the “Great American Novel” before it became unfashionable to speak of such things, but there’s no such thing as the “Great Greek Novel.”) Aside from culture-defining prose works like The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the closest thing we have to a traditional epic poem is Longfellow’s utterly tiresome Song of Hiawatha. But if Emerson is right about what the new American poet had to look like, we would expect him to define American culture in a radically new way–or, to put it more bluntly, to write an epic poem that is not, strictly speaking, an epic poem.

In the comment section of our most recent podcast, Chris Winn asks what I think of Harold Bloom’s positioning of Walt Whitman at the center of our canon–as the “Shakespeare of the American Canon,” to use Chris’s phrase. My answer is that the position is correct but that the author metaphor is off. The English epics are located on either side of Shakespeare: Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Milton’s Paradise Lost (though of course the latter is not a national epic). Shakespeare is the most celebrated of all British authors, but Chaucer and Spenser did far more to establish the island as a cultural powerhouse. No, Whitman is our Virgil, not our Shakespeare: his thunderous Old Testament free verse simultaneously connects him to the cultural past and severs the connection, just as Virgil’s adaptation of Homer did for Rome.

Our national epic, then, is the seventy-plus page lyric poem Song of Myself, which, like all great national epics, is more often skimmed and praised than read. Here Whitman destroys the self/other dichotomy that ruled Western thought for centuries. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” he says in an act of staggering egotism. But in American democracy, to praise oneself is to praise all, and Whitman continues, “And what I assume you shall assume / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Only our representative American could find in his every molecule the entire world–and vice versa.

Whitman, in Song of Myself, sets forth the American character the way Virgil sets forth the Roman character in The Aeneid–which is to say he talks about the myth of who we are (magnanimous, democratic, inclusive) rather than what we actually are most of the time (petty, oligarchic, snobbish). He positions our country historically and, even more, geographically. More importantly, his raving verses establish an American literary accent; it is safe to say that no British poet ever could have written Song of Myself. In this, Whitman asserts his nation’s cultural and literary independence. Calls for the American literary messiah ceased in the late nineteenth century, and our cultural inferiority complex eased substantially. (At least in the area of literature.)

Whitman, I should say, is by no means by favorite American poet. I seldom read him. But his social role in American history is nearly undeniable. One must love Whitman if one is to love American literature, if only because it was him who made us believe in ourselves as true producers of culture.

BLOOPBLEEPBLURGH

General Introduction
- What’s on the blog?
- The feud continues
- Polymathery

Cybernetics as Governance
- Not a portmanteau!
- Getting organized as a spiritual gift
- Rudder-steerer
- Modern definition
- Military purposes
- David Grubbs’s computer-programming past
- Feedback loops and exploding robot heads
- Cyborgs vs. androids

The Myth of Theuth
- Writing and memory
- Dialectic as a cure for writing
- The irony of the Phaedrus
- Writing as technology
- How providential is the time of Christ’s coming?
- (The use and misuse of providence)
- What are we giving away?

Cultural Cyborgs
- How the Tin Man became tin
- Blade Runner complicates memory
- Poe tries to get funny
- Cybernetics, villains, and disability
- Are children afraid of Darth Vader?

Heidegger: The Video Game
- Is the Guitar Hero stage part of Dasein?
- The appeal of video games
- Expanding the world
- Heidegger’s hammer and the physical world
- Entering into stories

The Technological Classroom
- Look-up-ability
- Memorizing facts to connect facts
- Spell check—quelle horreur!
- Phone numbers and birthdays
- Our limitless memories
- Nathan’s inability to memorize Bible verses

Where Do We Draw the Line?
- Are eyeglasses cybernetic?
- Resisting technology
- Why you never shed human limits
- Technology is part of humanism
- Breaking cell phones

The Takeaway Point
- Humanity doing its job
- Avoid idolatry
- Grace and avenues of it
- Breaking the mind/body dualism
- Be willing to change your anthropological model

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abe, Kobo. The Box Man. New York: Vintage, 2001.

—. The Face of Another. New York: Vintage, 2003.

Barrie, J.M. Peter Pan. New York: Henry Holt, 2003.

Baum, L. Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. New York: North-South, 1999.

Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.

Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Oxford UP, 2007.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie. New York: Harper, 2008.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Christopher Rowe. New York: Penguin, 2005.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Man That Was Used Up.” Poetry and Tales. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New York: Library of America, 1984.

Postman, Neil. Technopoly. New York: Vintage, 1993.

Edgar Allan Poe invented the detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” but was already bored with the genre a year later, when he published its sequel, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.” C. Auguste Dupin wraps up his first murder case rather neatly, and if modern readers’ knowledge of zoology renders that ending scientifically unsatisfactory in retrospect, we are still inclined to admire its aesthetic elegance. Certainly it paves the way for Arthur Conan Doyle’s delightful Sherlock Holmes cases, whose solutions are nearly always handed gingerly to the reader, wrapped up like a Christmas gift. Detective stories, quite often, are the theodicies of rationalist atheists: The reader is faced with a world of confusion and death, before being assured that an extraordinary intellect can untangle the strings and right the world’s wrongs.

Is it any wonder that the genre’s popularity boomed after the first World War, when global confusion was on the rise and faith in traditional religion was on the wane? Agatha Christie, a recent New Yorker article alleges, chose the mystery genre primarily because she was nearly guaranteed that a detective novel would be published. The Western world, clearly, was hungry for the assurances of order these novels provided. In many ways, the detective in fiction is a perfect distillment of the values of the Modern era: He is witty, rational, and able to see through layers of deceit with relative ease. The detective protagonist is how twentieth-century man imagines himself in his more self-flattering moments: urbane and cool, with faith in no one but himself. It should come as no surprise that Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were voracious readers of detective novels, even before film noir changed the game; mystery fiction portrayed the world the way an intellectual atheist at the time would want it to be. (The Catholic detective fiction of G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy L. Sayers is more reaction to the genre than participation in it.)

By the time of Christie’s greatest popularity, however, the formula had grown stale. One of the deepest pleasures of the Holmes stories is trying to figure out the answer to the mystery before Doyle reveals it outright. Christie makes such ratiocination nearly impossible: Her endings often seem to come out of nowhere, with a trail of clues so hidden that a bloodhound couldn’t sniff them out. The famous twist ending of Murder on the Orient Express–which I will not reveal here on the off chance that one of our readers doesn’t already know it–is one of the more obvious examples, but her novels are full of unguessable solutions, some of them of the “wallbanger” variety. Hercule Poirôt and Miss Marples, Christie seems to be saying, are much better than the rest of us, and the world is such a twisted mess that only they can make sense of it–the reader doesn’t have a prayer. This style of detective fiction is not without its charms, but it’s frustrating in a way that Holmes isn’t.

Film noir, and its literary cousin, the so-called “hardboiled” detective novel, provided a much-needed shock to the genre’s system. The stylistic differences are immediately apparent to everyone–Sam Spade is cynical and vulgar in a way that Holmes would never be–but the actual substance of the mysteries is different, too. The noir protagonist is lost from page one, or the opening credits, and the more he thinks he understands, the more lost he gets. This is especially true in the writings of Raymond Chandler, who perfected the hardboiled novel at about the same time as he put Los Angeles on the map as a place worth describing in literary fiction. There’s probably no twentieth-century American more responsible for blurring the boundaries between high and low art than Chandler, who was educated in the finest schools in England but returned to the States to write about dames, cigarettes, and crooked police departments.

The mystery is rather beside the point in Chandler’s novels. According to Hollywood legend, William Faulkner was writing the screenplay for The Big Sleep when he ran across a problem. “Who killed the chauffeur?” he asked. Chandler was forced to admit that he didn’t know either. The story is funny but telling: the whodoneit(s) at the center of Chandler’s novels take a backseat to the books’ overall mood, which is superb. As an example, I quote what is possibly the finest moment in Chandler’s career, taken from The Little Sister, a rather poorly plotted late-period novel:

I drove east on Sunset but I didn’t go home. At La Brea I turned north and swung over to Highland, out over Cahuenga Pass and down to Ventura Boulevard, past Studio City and Sherman Oaks and Encino. There was nothing lonely about this trip. There never is on that road. Fast boys in stripped-down Fords shot in and out of the traffic streams, missing fenders by a sixteenth of an inch, but somehow always missing them. Tired men in dusty coupes and sedans winced and tightened their grip on the wheel and ploughed on north and west towards home and dinner, an evening with the sports page, the blatting of the radio, the whining of their spoiled children and the gabble of their silly wives. I drove on past the gaudy neons and the false fronts behind them, the sleazy hamburger joints that look like palaces under the colors, the circular drive-ins as gay as circuses with the chipper hard-eyed car-hops, the brilliant counters, and the sweaty greasy kitchens that would have poisoned a toad. Great double trucks rumbled down over Sepulveda from Wilmington and San Pedro and crossed towards the Ridge Route, staring up in low-low from the traffic lights with a growl of lions in the rain.

Behind Encino an occasional light winked from the hills through thick trees. The homes of screen stars. Screen stars, phooey. The veterans of a thousand beds. Hold it, Marlowe, you’re not human tonight.

The air got cooler. The highway narrowed. The cars were so few now that the headlights hurt. The grade rose against chalk walls and at the top a breeze, unbroken from the ocean, danced casually across the night.

I ate dinner at a place near Thousand Oaks. Bad but quick. Feed ‘em and throw ‘em out. Lots of business. We can’t bother with you sitting over your second cup of coffee, mister. You’re using money space. See those people over there behind the rope? They want to eat. Anyway they think they have to. God knows why they want to eat here. They could do better home out of a can. They’re just restless. Like you. They have to get the car out and go somewhere. Sucker-bait for the racketeers that have taken over the restaurants. Here we go again. You’re not human tonight, Marlowe. . . .

I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living room that had been closed too long. But the colored lights fooled you. The lights were wonderful. There ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights. Fifteen stories high, solid marble. There’s a boy who really made something out of nothing.

This chapter is five pages of Chandler’s railing against his adopted hometown, a takedown so devastating that every pop-cultural critique of The Golden State from “Hotel California” to The Player owes an enormous debt to it. And none even comes close to matching it. Chandler’s words thrust the reader into the long-vanished Los Angeles of the 1940s; they remind us that the city has been a cesspool of gaudiness and corruption since long before the current debates over immigration, the recent budget crunch, and the reign of the Governator.

The corruption that surrounds Philip Marlowe is theologically significant; it suggests, perhaps, the Total Depravity of Calvinism, but Chandler lacks Calvin’s belief in a sovereign and benevolent God. In Chandler’s last completed novel, Playback, Marlowe is asked if he believes in God. His response is telling: “If you mean an omniscient and omnipotent God who intended everything to be exactly the way it is, no.” His interlocutor agrees: “If God were omnipotent and omniscient in any literal sense, he wouldn’t have bothered to make the universe at all. . . . Is it blasphemy to suggest that God has his bad days when nothing goes right, and that God’s days are very, very long?”

There is little reason to suppose these words do not represent Chandler’s own views on things, nor is there anything wrong with Chandler’s using his novel to promulgate these views. And yet real atheism inside a novel is, in a manner of speaking, impossible, for every novel always already has a god in its author, an entity which stands outside of its timeline and directs its action, for better or for worse. Even a novel that exists at least in part to promote atheism–such as, let’s say, John Fowles’s The Collector, one of the bleakest and ugliest books I’ve ever read–subverts its own point, at least in the world of the novel: Fowles can be an atheist, but Miranda can’t, because Fowles is her god. He may torment her and ultimately consign her to nonexistence, but he is still her god.

And this brings us back to “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”–and to Marlowe. Readers are likely to find Poe’s story frustrating because they are forced to spend 25-plus pages of very dense writing in pursuit of a solution that never arrives. The tale breaks off as Dupin finds a major clue (a boat that the detective claims will lead to the murderer), but the details and perpetrator of the crime are never revealed. If Poe himself knows, he’s not letting on. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that he does not know; “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” is based on a real-life murder, that of Mary Rogers of Baltimore, whose killer or killers were never brought to justice. These events suggest not an atheistic world–after all, there is still an author who is writing about more-or-less actual events–but a world of a limited and forgetful god.

We find the same dynamic in that wonderful story about The Big Sleep. In the world of the novel and film, there is, presumably, a concrete truth about who killed the chauffeur; it’s just that that truth has been forgotten by the god of the novel, Chandler. Marlowe has the god of his universe just right: He is neither omniscient nor omnipotent, collapsing into an alcoholic haze of “very, very long,” very, very bad days. He is not so much Luther’s Deus Absconditus–there is no evidence to suggest that the god Chandler is actively hiding from his characters–as a Deus Obliviscitus, an oblivious god who cannot remember every detail of the world he has created.

No doubt there are those who would say our own world is ruled by such a god, and perhaps justifiably so. This god would be a negative version of the cold and distant watchmaker of Deism–and as that belief system collapsed into atheism sometime in the last two centuries, so would the god of the broken mystery story. But this atheism would be a million miles removed from the mechanically precise world of the nü atheists. It would be something far more interesting, an utterly incomprehensible world that never worked the way it was supposed to, a world divided between the corrupt politicians of 1940s Los Angeles and the impotent good guys like Marlowe who couldn’t help but get conked in the head every few chapters.

Our outro music this week comes from Michael Knott’s 1994 record Rocket and a Bomb. The song’s called “Jan the Weatherman.” Hey, “Jan” rhymes with “Dan,” and our special guest this week is tornado chaser Dr. Dan Dawson. He’s kind of a weatherman, anyway.

General Introduction
- Where’s David Grubbs?
- Welcome to our special guest
- What’s on the blog?

Our History with Science
- Dan Dawson dreams of tornadoes
- Michial’s near-failures
- Easy science at Milligan College

Ancient Science
- The four elements
- Aristotle and the geocentric universe
- Methodological contributions
- Rapidly changing science
- A gratuitous shot at 2012

Arab Investigators and Medieval Science
- Why Nathan doesn’t call it science
- Elaborate biology
- Effect on Medieval drama

The Rise of Modern Science
- Reverence for mathematics
- Science as a self-correcting system
- How philosophical is your average scientist?
- “Whatever works”
- No sense of history

Tornadoes
- The Wizard of Oz
- A history lesson
- Electric tornadoes
- How tornadoes work
- But can we fix it?

Mad Scientists and the American Renaissance
- Emerson, Poe, and the War on Science
- Romanticism and the Enlightenment
- Hawthorne and the dangers of scientific perfection
- Melville and the unspeakable
- The death of the imagination

Dan Defends Science
- The move toward the holistic
- A sense of mystery
- The end of history
- The myth of progress

A New Kind of Science
- The ecological movement
- Merging the Romantic and the scientific
- Interdisciplinary interaction

Scientific Threats to Christianity
- Hegel, Nietzsche, Dawkins
- Integration by example, not argument
- Learning from the nü atheists
- Are confessing Christians a lunatic fringe?

The Limits of Science
- Physics and metaphysics
- The limits of theology
- The geocentric universe and evolution
- Non-overlapping magisteria
- The natural shift
- Why we’re frustrated with militant atheism and militant creationism

What We Need to Know
- Science is your ally
- The what questions and the why questions

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. On the Heavens. Trans. J.L. Stocks. Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1984. 447-511.

—. Sense and Sensibilia. Trans. J.I. Beare. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1984. 693-713.

Bacon, Francis. The Major Works. Ed. Brian Vickers. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Baum, L. Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. New York: Signet, 2006.

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. New York: Mariner, 2008.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Each and All.” Collected Poems and Translations. New York: Library of America, 1994. 9-10.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “The Birth-Mark.” Tales and Sketches. New York: Library of America, 1982. 764-780.

—. “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” Tales and Sketches. New York: Library of America, 1982. 975-1005.

Melville, Herman. “The Lightning-Rod.” Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Tales, Billy Budd. New York: Library of America, 1985.

—. Moby-Dick. New York: Norton, 1967.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “Sonnet—To Science.” Poetry and Tales. New York: Library of America, 1984. 38.

Sagan, Carl. Contact. New York: Pocket, 1997.

Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Our theme song this week is Chagall Guevara’s “Murder in the Big House” from their self-titled 1991 album–a forgotten gem.

General Introduction
- The Christian Humanist Circus
- Responses to listener email
- Our attempts at creative writing

Getting Down to It
- Bringing respect to detective fiction
- Let’s leave phrenology out of this

Mysteries in the Hebrew Bible
- Oh, Susanna
- The evolution of Hebrew Law
- Bel and the Dragon

Crime and Punishment in the Old World
- Trial by torture, combat, and ordeal
- Catching the conscience of the king
- Ann Radcliffe as Scooby Doo predecessor

An American Invention
- Poe’s “tales of ratiocination”
- Michial gets to say things in French
- Dupin’s “intuitive science”
- Poe shatters his own conventions
- Relationship between mystery and horror

Sherlock Holmes
- Why do we remember Holmes and not Dupin?
- The romanticism of “The Purloined Letter”
- Sherlock Holmes, Victorian über-mensch
- Some love for Dr. Watson, the reader’s surrogate
- “Hello? 911? This is Robin!”
- Humanizing Greg House
- The homo-erotic turn

The Wounded Detective
- Relationships, not crimes
- Lampshading Bones
- The deep-seated tragedy of The Wire

Father Brown Breaks the Pattern
- Religious not-belonging
- Beating the purely rational
- The devils in the detective’s heart

Justice and Law
- Why PIs don’t trust the police
- A preference for local law enforcement
- The strange conservatism of detective fiction
- Our need for an outsider
- Going maverick—going rogue
- Michial Farmer’s Existential Detective Agency

A New Kind of Detective Fiction
- The Crying of Lot 49
- The fruitless search of Oedipa Maas
- Trying to find patterns in the static

Jessica Fletcher and Lord Peter Wimsey
- Satisfying Sam Mulberry
- Michial gets the sad trombone
- Dorothy Sayers turns down the invitation
- Why detective stories aren’t like real life
- What is it with Catholic intellectuals and mysteries?

Procedurals
- Technology gets ahead of the real world
- Oracular and magic computers
- The King of All Procedurals
- Problems in the real world
- Another Farmerian rant about democracy

Our Recommendations
- Monk
- Kinky Friedman’s Roadkill
- The Wire
- Father Brown
- Lord Peter Wimsey
- Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adler, David A. and Susanna Natti. Cam Jansen: The Mystery of the Dinosaur Bones. New York: Puffin, 2004.

Chesterton, G.K. “The Blue Cross.” The Complete Father Brown. New York: Penguin, 1987. 9-22.

—. “The Hammer of God.” The Complete Father Brown. New York: Penguin, 1987. 118-130.

—. “The Secret Garden.” The Complete Father Brown. New York: Penguin, 1987. 23-38.

Christie, Agatha. Murder on the Orient Express. New York: Berkley, 2004.

Dixon, Franklin W. The Hardy Boys Starter Set. New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 2009.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2010.

Eco, Umberto. Foucault’s Pendulum. New York: Mariner, 2007.

Friedman, Kinky. Roadkill. New York: Ballantine, 1997.

Hope, Laura Lee. The Bobbsey Twins at Pilgrim Rock. New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 1956.

Irwin, John. American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983.

Keene, Carolyn. Nancy Drew Starter Set. New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 2009.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Man of the Crowd.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Sketches. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn and G.R. Thompson. New York: Library of America, 1984. 388-396.

—. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Sketches. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn and G.R. Thompson. New York: Library of America, 1984. 397-431.

—. “The Mystery of Marie Rougêt.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Sketches. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn and G.R. Thompson. New York: Library of America, 1984. 506-554.

—. “The Purloined Letter.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Sketches. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn and G.R. Thompson. New York: Library of America, 1984. 680-698.

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999.

Queen, Ellery. Ellery Queen: Five Complete Novels. New York: Avenel, 1988.

Radcliff, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. New York: Penguin, 2001.

Sayers, Dorothy L. Lord Peter: The Complete Lord Peter Wimsey Stories. New York: Harper, 1986.

—. The Mind of the Maker. New York: Continuum, 2004.

Sobol, Donald J. Encyclopedia Brown Boxed Set. New York: Puffin, 2007.

Stout, Rex. The Rubber Band / The Red Box. New York: Bantam, 2009.

Warner, Gertrude Chandler. The Boxcar Children, Books 1-4. Park Ridge, Ill.: Albert Whitman, 1990.

Another Gilmour-less episode. It may be until tomorrow before it gets added to iTunes, etc. I’m sure you’ll recognize the theme music.

General Introduction
- No Nathan
- What’s on the blog?

Our Emotionally Scarring Experiences
- The Shining haunts Michial’s dreams
- Slasher movies
- Beetlejuice and a man in a yellow wolf suit
- Toy monkeys
- Why dolls are so scary
- FREDDY KREUGER!!!!

Ancient Horror
- What Nathan was going to talk about
- Monsters vs. monster-slayers
- Were these supposed to be scary?
- Lilith
- Scandinavian sagas
- Skipping Renaissance drama

English Gothic
- Horace Walpole
- A list of gothic conventions

American Gothic
- Charles Brockden Brown
- Ditching the castle
- Why Wieland is a failure
- Pseudo-science in Poe and Hawthorne
- The difference between Hawthorne and Poe
- “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and the folk legend

Frankenstein and Dracula
- David clarifies
- Scientific anxiety
- Does Frankenstein still resonate with us?
- Dracula and the Victorian nightmare of devolution
- Why Dracula is cooler than Edward Cullen
- Vampiric sexuality

20^th-Century Horror and “Weird Fiction”
- Kafka as pseudo-horror
- Crazy worlds and paranoia
- H.P. Lovecraft
- Existential horror
- “Dover Beach” as horror poem

Movies and Television
- What film does that literature can’t do
- The amorphous and the concrete
- The Twilight Zone
- The X-Files and its real-world grounding
- Jaws as Enuma Elish
- Michial gets very graphic

Why Do We Love Horror?
- Katharsis
- Making anxiety into fear
- Facing your fear
- Corruption of childhood

The Christian Response
- A spirit of fear?
- Didactic purposes
- The Christian and torture porn
- Analyzing the Pig People

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Arnold, Matthew. “Dover Beach.” The Poems of Matthew Arnold. Boston: Adamant Media, 2005.

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Norton, 2001.

Brown, Charles Brockden. Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. Kent, Oh.: Kent State UP, 1987.

—. Wieland; or, the Transformation, Together with Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1926.

Eirik the Red and Other Icelandic Sagas. Trans. Gwyn Jones. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation. Trans. Andrew George. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Enuma Elish: The Seven Tablets of the History of Creation. Trans. L.W. King. New York: FQ Classics, 2007.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “The Birthmark.” Hawthorne’s Short Stories. Ed. Newton Arvin. New York: Knopf, 1946. 147-164.

—. The Blithedale Romance. New York: Norton, 1978.

—. “Rappacini’s Daughter.” Hawthorne’s Short Stories. Ed. Newton Arvin. New York: Knopf, 1946. 179-209.

Irving, Washington. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” New York: Signet, 1981. 329-360.

Kafka, Franz. The Castle. Trans. Anthea Bell. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

—. “In the Penal Colony.” Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. The Complete Stories. Ed. Nahum N. Glazer. New York: Schocken, 1971. 140-167.

—. “The Metamorphosis.” Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. The Complete Stories. Ed. Nahum N. Glazer. New York: Schocken, 1971. 89-139.

King, Stephen. The Shining. New York: Pocket, 2002.

Lovecraft, H.P. Tales. New York: Library of America, 2005.

Meyer, Stephanie. Twilight. New York: Little, Brown, 2006.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Black Cat.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New York: Library of America, 1996. 597-606.

—. “The Imp of the Perverse.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New York: Library of America, 1996. 826-832.

—. “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New York: Library of America, 1996. 555-559.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

I’ve been accused of being “anti-science” on the podcast, a charge against which I’ve done my best to defend myself. My suspicion, as I say in that second post, is not of science qua science but of science’s attempt to either (a) discover metaphysical truth; or, more often these days, (b) discount metaphysical truth as a legitimate thing. (Richard Dawkins, to recap, actually says in an interview with Salon.com that “why” questions aren’t worth asking; Michael Shermer says that the Self is a mere series of chemical reactions.)

So it’ll come as no surprise that I will suspend my normal stance on Edgar Allan Poe (I don’t like him much at all) for his poem “Sonnet—To Science”:

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities!
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

Obviously, the poem still applies today; you could easily mail it to Dawkins or Shermer and not have to change anything (and you’d probably want to highlight lines six and seven, which seem particularly directed at militant atheists who cloak their baseline fundamentalism under a veil of objectivity).

The truth, though, is that Poe is operating in a very clear tradition—the writers of the American Renaissance (and the period just before it, since Poe is generally not considered part of that movement) are united in their suspicions of science’s ability to create a coherent worldview, morality, and metaphysic. Think of Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark,” in which naïve scientism leads to the destruction of the human being; or think of Moby-Dick, which gives us hundreds of pages of cetological detail, which leaves us no closer to understanding the white whale. The writers of the American Renaissance are united in their general Romanticism, which—naturally enough—reacts against the dominant worldview of the previous generation, Enlightenment-style “objective” scientism.

Even Ralph Waldo Emerson—despised by Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville alike—gets in on the act. For example, in his essay “Love” (1841), he suggests that art is something beyond the scope of science altogether, a metaphysical truth: “The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing.” This goes not just for objects of beauty, but objects of ugliness—because Enlightenment scientism is blindly optimistic (man is perfectible, the universe is comprehensible, and we’re probably going to do both next weekend), Emerson make a turn toward the dark (unexpectedly, for anyone unfamiliar with Emerson’s frequent pessimism):

Every thing is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour, if seen as experience. Details are melancholy; the plan is seemly and noble. In the actual world—the painful kingdom of time and place—dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy.

Here Emerson has set up two paths to truth: the intellect, identified not just with reason but also with idealization; and the imagination, identified with experience, aesthetic appreciation, and inscrutability. This dichotomy basically persists throughout the writings of the American Renaissance. Thus Emerson can claim, in “Each and All,” that the scientific mindset destroys any ability to see things purely:

The delicate shells lay on the shore;
The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave;
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me.
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore.
(ll. 19-27)

Emerson’s actions here are the actions of a clichéd scientist—seeing something beautiful or interesting, he picks the scene apart and takes the components back to the laboratory, only to find that his analysis has destroyed what made the elements special to begin with. Poe gets at the same thing in “Sonnet—To Science” when he says that Science “alterest all things with thy peering eyes”; these are basically early versions of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle!

In the end, Emerson’s solution to the problem of analysis is a more or less religious solution—one must submit oneself to the beauty of the oneness of all things: “I yielded myself to the perfect whole” (l. 51), he says, and in this way maintains the beauty of the scene in his own subjective reaction to it. You can’t pick truth apart, and you can’t discover it in a laboratory—it’s an experience. (If this is sounding a lot like Christian existentialism, remember that Kierkegaard was writing at the same time as Emerson and Poe and that he, too, was reacting to Enlightenment scientism.)

But both Emerson and Poe have an attitude that’s more complicated than a simple rejection of science. Early on his career, Emerson was able to claim that “we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy”—a statement absolutely dripping with scientific optimism. The key to interpretation here, though, is the way those answers come: “Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put.” So any answers we get are going to come not from the laboratory but from lived experience, from the soul. It is worth noting, too, that the physical truths the scientist can discover are worthless for Emerson unless they lead to higher, spiritual truths.

That brings us back to Poe, who, like Emerson, does not simplistically reject science or its benefits. Indeed, I can think of very few nineteenth-century writers who utilized the sciences and pseudo-sciences of his day as effectively as Poe did—and of course the detective story, which he invented, depends on objective reasoning. Even Poe’s afterlife is couched in scientific terms. As one of the dead people in “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” puts it,

Now it was that, in twilight, we discoursed of the days to come, when the Art-scarred surface of the Earth, having undergone that purification which alone should efface its rectangular obscenities, should clothe itself anew in the verdure and mountain-slopes and the smiling waters of Paradise, and be rendered at length a fit dwelling-place for man:—for man the Death-purged—for man to whose now exalted intellect there should be poison in knowledge no more—for the redeemed, regenerated, blissful, and now immortal, but still for the material, man.

The afterlife is physical for Poe; God Himself is physical, in fact, called in “Mesmeric Revelation” “not spirit, for he exists. Nor is he matter, as you understand it. But there are gradations of matter of which man knows nothing; the grosser impelling the finer, the finer pervading the grosser.” So Poe is a sort of materialist mystic—there is no such thing as the non-material world, and yet the world we see around us is not the end of the story because there is a hypothetical and non-testable “finer gradation of matter” all around us, in which God and dead people live. This formulation is bound to make both the scientist and the Christian angry.

Poe’s problem with science, then, as expressed in “Sonnet—To Science” is not that it formulates a wholly material universe—Poe himself does that—but that it assumes that it can get its mind around the materialist universe, a mindset he calls, in “Monos and Una,” “the propensity of man to define the indefinable.” Some things just are and cannot be studied—even if other things can be studied.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t use the indefinable for our materialist and scientific purposes, however. The dominant mode of Poe’s “tales of ratiocination” (the detective stories “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Rouget,” and “The Purloined Letter,” along with more fantastic stories like “The Descent Into the Maelstrom”) is what John T. Irwin calls “scientific intuition”; M. Dupin, for example, acts completely logically in the detective stories in which he features, but he can do so only by taking leaps based on intuition. Poe offers a simultaneously scientific and mystical viewpoint, and if he criticizes the scientist in “Sonnet—To Science,” it’s only for leaving out half of the equation, and he would, I am certain, criticize religious believers for leaving out the other half.

I can’t fully agree with either Poe or Emerson here—I am, as the podcast introduction says, “unapologetically confessional,” and so I can’t accept the vague pantheism of Emerson or the mystical materialism of Poe. But I think they’re hinting at the proper relationship between faith and reason. Without the former, the latter can’t answer the ever-important why questions; without the latter, the former cannot survive in the real world.