Poe: Introduction and "Ligeia"

Poe as first modern short story writer?  Irving, Hoffman, Hawthorne

Poe helps establish the parameters of the short story

Also help popularize the “unreliable narrator” tradition—in which the audience is “tricked” into identifying with a mad man?  Why would we want to read a story from a disturbed mind? 

Narrator—fictional creation within a story to act as the voice or homunculus of the author (just like alchemist Faust creating “mini-me” below)—the “voice” of the author

      AUTHOR                    narrator

Unreliable narrator—the author has deliberately subverted the mimetic tradition of narrator representing the author—we expect some level of objectivity, rationality, morality from the narrator/author

We expect the author (through the narrator) to tell us the truth (in some kind of objectively provable form)

Unreliable narrator—you can’t trust what they’re saying, their “take” on reality, their motive for telling the story

Motive of “Shipwrecked Sailor” narrator—to teach a moral lesson—the traditional motive of storyteller/narrator is to delight and instruct

Anyone had a “face the serpent” episode? A moment of truth?

Motive of an unreliable narrator—why are the narrators of “Ligeia” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” telling their stories?

You can’t trust that an unreliable narrator is giving a full, true, objective account and you can’t trust him/her motive for telling the story

Unreliable narrator feels compulsion to narrate—his/her subjective experience outweighs the mimetic tradition of recreating a fictional representation of an objective reality; motive may be psychotic, guilt

“Ligeia”

The Will: the ultimate driving force behind the engine of our consciousness and actions

How does narrative violate expectations from the get-go?  First-person speaker (admitting that he doesn’t know certain things, this “I” seems unreal, disconnected from reality, unknown and unnamed)—begin with uncertainty/doubt

Description of Ligeia:

·       incomprehensible lightness and elasticity footfall

·       She came and departed as a shadow

·       my closed study

·       dear music of her low sweet voice

·       marble hand upon my shoulder

·       In beauty of face no maiden ever equalled her

·       the radiance of an opium-dream

·       an airy and spirit-lifting vision

·       daughters of Delos (classical Greek island for worship and omens)

·       features not of that regular mould

·       heathen

narrator worships her, she’s fantasy-like, self-appointed god, shadowy, unreal, figment of his imagination, obsession, drug-dream

face of Ligeia (strange, but can’t say how) and then the eyes

why does the narrator focus on the eyes? Window of the soul—eyes as symbol of the incommensurable, the incomprehensible, the ineffable (what cannot be put into words)

romantic paradox—trying to write about what cannot be written about (show the limits of language itself, as representation, as mimesis—symbols may work better than words themselves)

the ineffable—the divine often seen as ineffable (beyond the power of words to define or limit)  because language is a human construction, it has limits of the human in terms of being able to comprehend, describe, understand

Ligeia is transcendentalist: American romantic movement which borrowed from Eastern religion ideas about transcending physical body into a spiritual state (reincarnation—soul existing outside the body) Emerson (“The Over-Soul”—the world soul that each living being is part and particle of); Thoreau;

In her dying moment Ligeia loses transcendentalist faith for a darker nihilistic vision (Conquerer Worm) (Dark Romanticism)

“I loathed her with a hatred belonging more to demon than to man. My memory flew back, (oh, with what intensity of regret!) to Ligeia, the beloved, the august, the beautiful, the entombed.”

Narrator is obsessed with her, but also possesses her “entombed.” He possesses her more in death than life.

Lady Rowena, light-haired, blue-eyed, drinks wine

“It was then that I became distinctly aware of a gentle footfall upon the carpet, and near the couch; and in a second thereafter, as Rowena was in the act of raising the wine to her lips, I saw, or may have dreamed that I saw, fall within the goblet, as if from some invisible spring in the atmosphere of the room, three or four large drops of a brilliant and ruby colored fluid. If this I saw --not so Rowena.”

Unreliability?  Did this happen?  What do the drops do?  Kill Rowena?  Allow her (Rowena/Ligeia) to be reborn?  Narrator doesn’t explain

RULE OF SHORT STORY—WHAT YOU LEAVE OUT AS IMPORTANT AS WHAT YOU LEAVE IN.