Edgar the Jingle-man
A recent Webby Award winner, Knowing Poe is an educational site about Baltimore's greatest literary institution. Both the content and design are sleek and clear (that is, pretty much useless), but the three condemning comments about Poe's work are great fun.
Although I think Poe is considerably more readable than Mark Twain, I must admit that the man's opinions have something going for them: "To me his prose is unreadable ? like Jane Austen's. No, there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death."
The arch-poet Toilets fears the author of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" might be a bit too juvenile: "That Poe had a powerful intellect is undeniable: but it seems to me the intellect of a highly gifted person before puberty." Gleeful obsession with sex (usually in the form of various fetishes), death and clever tricks are characteristically adolescent attributes in the eyes of such somber characters as our old friend Tom.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Oh, you mean the jingle-man." That's Poe taken care of. Is he really the ultimate supplier of pleasant tinkling nonsense? Without question, he is the mastermind behind the high concepts and twist endings which drive the narrative logic of Hollywood films, but some of Poe's stories do have a particular extra dimension. An article comparing the styles of Nabokov and Hitchcock touches upon this aspect:
"Unlike Nabokov, Hitchcock did not discover Poe until he was about sixteen, but then he became fascinated by reading Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. In a 1960 article Hitchcock noted '...it's because I liked Edgar Allan Poe's stories so much that I began to make suspense films. Without wanting to seem immodest, I can't help but compare what I try to put in my films with what Poe put in his stories; a perfectly unbelievable story recounted to readers with such a hallucinatory logic that one has the impression that this same story can happen to you tomorrow.'"
If nothing else, at least Poe knew how to pick his opening quotations. That story featuring Dupin and a trained ape begins with Sir Thomas Browne's immortal sentence of scholarly optimism: "What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture."
What follows is a perfectly unbelievable story ruled by hallucinatory logic. The ending is an onslaught of boyish obsessions:
"As the sailor looked in, the gigantic animal had seized Madame L'Espanaye by the hair, (which was loose, as she had been combing it,) and was flourishing the razor about her face, in imitation of the motions of a barber. The daughter lay prostrate and motionless; she had swooned. The screams and struggles of the old lady (during which the hair was torn from her head) had the effect of changing the probably pacific purposes of the Ourang-Outang into those of wrath. With one determined sweep of its muscular arm it nearly severed her head from her body."
I don't normally spend my time thinking about pulp fiction and fetishes (in this case: hair); I'm just working on another Spike article. Honest.
