The Tell-Tale Heart

We went down to Albuquerque last week for an Edgar Allan Poe theatrical, which was entertaining in itself, and got you thinking about Poe beyond the confines and conventions of theater.  It was billed as a “speakeasy,” and they did indeed serve themed drinks in the intervals.  Carole had seen a previous production, up in Farmington, and loved it, the event put on in different venues by different casts.

You open on a set that could be a garret, or a study, and Poe enters to introduce himself, and talk a little about his work, his themes and obsessions - death of course a big one – and then slips into the shadows as another actor comes on to dramatize the story, first up, “The Fall of the House of Usher.”  Curiously, they were musical interludes, sung-spoken, so it helped if you were already familiar with the plotlines, because they were really riffs or attitudes toward the stories, not staged readings.  “Usher” was efficiently creepy, followed by “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Premature Burial,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Gold Bug,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” the two of the more famous poems, “Annabelle Lee” and “The Raven.”  So it was a highlight reel, with drink breaks.  I liked the actor who played Poe a lot, but I thought the rest of the cast was less successful.  Mostly, I think, because of the material they were given.  The trouble with condensing Poe, or any writer, isn’t just that you lose the words themselves, but the sense of the words - the rhythm, and the pace.  Poe creates dread through a very calculated use of echoes and repetition, foreshadowing and false narratives.  What he’s struggling to write, in effect, is psychological horror.  Even though that term, or even the concept, didn’t exist at the time.

David Morrell has suggested that Thomas De Quincey, in his series of essays, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, is actually engaging in psychological analysis – Morrell has now written three period thrillers about it - although that concept was unknown to the Victorians.  Freud and the Vienna school were sixty years away.  Poe is, for one thing, influenced by De Quincey, but it seems pretty clear to a modern reader that Poe is trying to describe a phenomenon he doesn’t have the vocabulary for.  Roderick Usher is deeply weird and wicked, his sexual mania left to the reader’s imagination, but the house cracking at its foundations and collapsing into the dark lake is vivid and literal.  Sure, it’s metaphorical, but it’s illustrative of psychological collapse.  Roderick is coming apart at the seams, because he can’t stand the idea that his dying sister’s body might be stolen, to be dissected by medical students in an anatomy class, so he buries her alive to prevent it.  The whole thing reeks of what was diagnosed in the 19^th century as hysteria, a peculiarly female malady.

Poe is readily characterized as Gothic, and I think there’s more going on here than that.  Not that there has to be more, for Poe to be taken seriously, but that he’s actually even odder than we imagined.  My main takeaway from our recent evening with Poe, down in Albuquerque, is that it’s past time I revisited his writing.  His influence is widely recognized, and he probably deserves to be read.