Edgar Allan Poe's (Meta) Physics A Pre-History of The Post-Human

Edgar Allan Poe's (Meta)physics: A Pre-History of the Post-Human
Author(s): Matthew A. Taylor

Source: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 62, No. 2 (September 2007), pp. 193-221
Published by: University of California Press
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Edgar Allan Poes

(Meta)physics:
A Pre-History of
the Post-Human
MATTHEW A. TAYLOR
n 1852 Herbert Mayo, renowned professor of physiology and anatomy at

Kings College, London, published in Philadelphia his Popular
Superstitions, and the Truths Contained therein, with an Account of
Mesmerism, which claimed to make all phenomenafrom the
singular facts of divining rods, clairvoyant trances, and vampires to the more common matters of batteries, magnets, and
dreams comprehensible through reference to a single, recently discovered energy allied to but distinct from electricity,
magnetism, and heat.1 This Od or Odic force, as it was
named by its discoverer, the noted geologist and chemist Baron
von Reichenbach, supposedly animated the entire material and
spiritual universe. Indeed, Mayo sought to convince his readers
that the forces influence was ubiquitous, governing all things
animate and inanimate, seen and unseen; but most important to
Mayo was his more specific claim that individual persons, and
consequently humanity as a whole, were powerfully affected by
Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 62, No. 2, pp. 193221. ISSN: 0891-9356, online ISSN: 10678352. 2007 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct
all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University
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1 See Mayo, Popular Superstitions, and the Truths Contained Therein, with an Account of
Mesmerism (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1852), p. 10.
193

194
ninet eenth -c en t u ry l it e r at u r e
the force. No less than the entirety of peoples physical and spiritual lives, their strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures, fates and character traits, were dependent upon the particular amount and polarity of Od force around and within their
bodies. Even consciousness itself, because it was theorized to be
predicated upon electrical activity in the nervous system, was
found to result from the Od forces action upon the self.
Far from a cultural aberration, Mayos study was in fact
representative of a significant current of nineteenth-century
thought. Mayo was writing in the context of numerous theories
premised upon the existence of an omnipresent force or principle, including philosophical systems (panpsychism, Naturphilosophie, transcendentalism), speculative sciences (electrophysiology, Humboldtian cosmology), and cultural practices that
conflated the two (mesmerism, spiritualism). He was committed, like many of his peers, to uncovering a rational, unified, and
material model of the physical and metaphysical universeas
well as the place of the newly conceived human within it.2
Of course, this idea that the whole of existencewhether natural, spiritual, or humanis reducible to a single, apprehensible law has a long history in Western thought apart from
orthodox Christian theology, ranging from the Newtonian celestial mechanism of the Enlightenment to the animism and
atomism of pre-Socratic Greece; though the particular beliefs
and emphases of these systems vary dramatically, all hold that
Man, even if granted ontological priority, is inexorably subject
to the same powers and laws that superintend the rest of the universe. What the nineteenth century adds to this narrative is, on
the one hand, a Romantic discourse of the Individuals essential
continuity with the natural world (and thus with the Spirit behind it), and, on the other hand, an increasingly professionalized scientific method enlisted to analyze such claims. Conceivably contradictory (and often actually so), these two positions
2 I cannot here adequately address the considerable critical work done on the development and reification of a natural-historical notion of the human over the course
of the mid eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries, but see especially Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,
2004) for an argument that the development of the nineteenth-century human sciences hardened the reification of an ontologically distinct (and superior) human.

edgar alla n poes (meta )ph ys ic s
195
nevertheless intersect in the perception that human beings are

fundamentally interlineated with their larger environments. In
this context, we can see even such mundane matters as the midcentury germ theory debates and Theodor Schwanns 1839
postulation of cell membrane permeability as participating in
the same general conversation as Henry David Thoreaus Walden
(1854) or the Fox sisters 1848 spirit-rappings: all were evidence
that bodies (and thus selves) are radically open to their surroundings, whether physical or spiritual.3
Thus, though an ardent materialist, Mayo regarded supposedly spiritual matters such as mesmerism (extensively documented in the popular and esoteric literature of the period) as
established factsbut ones subtended by a rational, scientific
law rather than an impenetrable supernatural source. In fact,
Mayo thought that mesmerism was humanitys purest distillation of the Od force as of yet, and certainly the most illustrative,
because it perfectly captured peoples dependence upon the
workings of external powers.4 That this was the case, that mesmerisms spectacular effectstelepathy insensitivity to physical
stimuli, reading through fingertips, hearing with stomachs, and
so onwere the result of putative individuals becoming radically subject to an extrinsic determinant, was scripted for Mayo
and others in the entranced patients ready acquiescence to the
mesmerists commands and in the mesmerists own sympathetic
connection with the mental and physical states of their patients.5
Moreover, because for Mayo the Od force behind mesmerism
was not uniquely invested in its human participants but instead
permeated all of existence, everyday places and objects were
imparted with a new and extraordinary significance: the univer3 I am by necessity generalizingbut, I would argue, no more so than is licensed by
the works to which I refer. See Thomas S. Hall, Ideas of Life and Matter: Studies in the History of General Physiology, 600 B.C.1900 A.D., 2 vols. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1969).
4 Prior to Mayos nomination of the Od force, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
theories of the basis of mesmerisms power varied from invisible ethers to electromagnetic fluids, and claims regarding its effects proved equally diverse; but all postulated
that the underlying energy, whatever its form, was universal and infinite.
5 See Popular Superstitions, p. 169; see also p. 121. For a definitive overview of mesmerisms European origins and history, see Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in
Victorian Britain (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998).

196
sality of the Od meant that persons and things were interconnected to such an extent that the force of things could either
upset or restore the Od balance of persons, with baleful or
beneficial results, respectively.
For Mayo, then, mesmerisms revelation of the continuity
between ostensibly differentiated persons and their environments was not merely incidental; it was the practices condition
of possibility. The disintegration of the boundaries dividing self
and other, synecdochic for the general convergence of self and
world, was requisite for mesmerisms dramatic exhibitions of
control over individual bodies. In this light, in mesmerisms and
the Od forces transfer of authority over the human from the
traditional Christian God to a universal physical law, humanity
was no longer a creation apart, an isolated point of significance
defined in relief against an essentially detached world; instead,
the species was integrated within a unified, physical cosmos.
And yet this integration did not result, for Mayo, in either the
species disappearance or its irrelevance.6 Rather, conceding
that the Ods operations were largely opaque and uncontrolled
at present, Mayo had every confidence that humanity might one
day manipulate its energies for the improvement of the race. Indeed, Mayo intimated that mesmeric healings might be the
first, tentative step toward a future utopia in which a harnessed
Od force would be consciously directed toward the full realization of humanitys now dormant potentialities.
Like Mayo, Edgar Allan Poe actively studied mesmerism
in the 1830s and 1840s. In addition to writing three explicitly mesmeric tales, Poe reviewed and published the work of
other writers on the subject, was acquainted with some of the
mesmerist luminaries of his day, and maintained a correspondence with various experts in the field.7 And, like Mayo, Poe regarded mesmerism as a particularly vivid instantiation of a more
6 Mayo thus duplicates the paradoxical logic of taxonomic natural histories since
Linnaeus: assuming humanitys fundamental commonality with the rest of nature, on
the one hand, while still reserving a sense of the significance of human difference, on
the other. See Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996).
7 For summaries of Poes relation to mesmerism, see Sidney E. Lind, Poe and Mesmerism, PMLA, 62 (1947), 1,07794; Doris V. Falk, Poe and the Power of Animal
Magnetism, PMLA, 84 (1969), 536 46; Adam Frank, Valdemars Tongue, Poes

197
fundamental process wherein persons are subjected to the control of material universal forces. Unlike Mayo, however, Poe radically deviated from the utopian, utilitarian, or benign notions
of mesmerism at play in most contemporary discourses on the
topic, picturing instead the unsettling implications for human
ontology consequent upon the idea that persons are less sovereign entities than manipulatable effects of external powers.8
Rather than optimistically assuming, as Mayo and others did,
that identifying a universal force is equivalent to mastering it
for the betterment of humanity, Poe concluded that an allencompassing cosmic energy inevitably troubles human-being
by suspending the autonomy and interiority of individual humans; the disorientation of normal, corporeal functioning and
the literal loss of self-possession attending mesmeric practice illustrated for Poe the fact that people are little more than occasions for the demonstration of an impersonal power. For Poe,
then, mesmerism reveals the selfs identityits putative independence and integrityto be disturbingly fragile, if not altogether illusory.
In thus suggesting that contact with things profounder
than selves is necessarily disintegrative of the individual subject,
Telegraphy, ELH, 72 (2005), 635 62; and Bruce Mills, Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric
Arts: Transition States in the American Renaissance (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press,
2006). For broader accounts of mesmerism in America, see Maria M. Tatar, Spellbound:
Studies on Mesmerism and Literature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978); John J.
Kucich, Ghostly Communion: Cross-Cultural Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century American
Literature (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2004); Samuel Chase Coale, Mesmerism and Hawthorne: Mediums of American Romance (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama
Press, 1998); Robert C. Fuller, Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls (Philadelphia:
Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1982); and Bret E. Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 1997). For a useful collection
of Poes positive statements about mesmerism, see Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson, The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 18091849 (Boston: G. K. Hall
and Co., 1987), pp. 523, 619.
8 Poe consistently rejects his ages belief in the ultimate perfectibility of society
(Fuller, Mesmerism, p. 21), deriding many of the movements associated with mesmeric
principles, including such causes as temperance, womens rights, abolitionism, communitarianism, phrenology, . . . as well as dietary, dress, marriage, and medical reform
(Carroll, Spiritualism, p. 4). Writing to James Russell Lowell on 2 July 1844, Poe succinctly notes: I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will
have no appreciable effect upon humanity (The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John
Ward Ostrom, 2 vols. [New York: Gordian Press, 1966], I, 256).

198
Poe touches upon a paradox at the heart of many nineteenthcentury metaphysical discourses: namely, the idea that cosmic
forces undermine any meaningful sense of the discreteness or
individuality of selves but, simultaneously, are also available for
various practices of the self around which the individual subject
can cohere (relevant here would be mesmerism or Madame
Blavatskys later theosophy, but also, perhaps less obviously,
Ralph Waldo Emersons Nature [1836] or Walt Whitmans Leaves
of Grass [1855]). Poes rejection of this logic is significant because of both its timing and its broader implications, intervening as it does early in the development of a larger, quintessentially American formulation: the self-affirming dialectic
between an emergent humanist Individualism (and its concomitant notion of the autonomous, sovereign individual) and
those supra-personal forces (whether political, economic, or
religious) understood to be simultaneously greater than individuals and yet also primary sources of individual identity. Earlycentury discourses of citizenship in American democracy (such
as those by Alexis de Tocqueville), mid-century social and religious utopianisms, or late-century articulations of individuals in
industrial capitalism (such as Andrew Carnegies) may be the
most familiar examples, but the underlying logic was ubiquitous.9 Poefamously anti-democratic, anti-nationalistic, anticapitalisticmakes clear, however, that you cannot have it both
ways, cannot transcend the self for the sake of the self, cannot
unify the social, much less the universal, without eliminating
(the individuality of ) individuals.10
In Poes universe, then, a cosmic force exists, but not in the
service of human interests. Nonidealistic, asocial, and nonhuman, this universal principle relegates humankind to, at best, an
ephemeral existence: contingent, never assured, constantly en-
9 For the oft-noted convergence of theories of liberal democracy and market capitalism in the formation of a distinctively American form of individualism, see Steven
Lukes, Individualism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973); and Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller, et al. (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1986).
10 For the best articulation of Poes antagonism toward myths of national or economic
progress, see J. Gerald Kennedy, A Mania for Composition: Poes Annus Mirabilis and
the Violence of Nation-building, American Literary History, 17 (2005), 135.

199
dangered. Indeed, the first principle of Poes cosmology is that

the universe actively erodes that which can only heuristically
be called human, individual, or self, and does so in a manner that is neither notional nor deferred, but corporeal and immediate. The general permeability, and thus susceptibility, of
persons to largely invisible, abstract forces posited in the theories of Mayo and others becomes, in Poes redaction, a graphic,
sensory process wherein people are disarticulated by the tangible, cosmically invested objects of their putatively everyday
worlds. Such objects, I argue, portend, embody, and enact Poes
own version of the (meta)physics of his age, a perverse yet consistent calculus that unites everything in existence under a single, universal law that, by definition, eliminates all difference
including, of course, the human difference. In other words,
what happens to characters bodies in Poes tales mirrors what
happens, more fundamentally, to their selves vis--vis the universe. Whether on the grand, cosmological scale of Eureka
(1848) or in the microcosms of his short fiction, Poe pictures
the simultaneous provocation and erasure of subjectivity attending the encounter between self and world, person and
thing. In this essay, I contend that the surprising consistency
of this cosmological process in Poes writing necessitates that
we interpret his works through a lens focused not on the discrete
subject, as has been done (psychoanalytically, deconstructively,
sociologically), but instead on the a-human universe in which
these subjectsmomentarily obtain. Such an interpretation offers not only a different way of reading Poe but also
a different way of understanding the contravening relation of
his thought (negative, nonproductive, nonethical) to the
utopian positivity of both his ages human(ist) cultural imaginary and our ages resultant, reactionary discourse of the posthuman. 11
11 I am thinking particularly of those post-human discourses that position themselves as corrections to what is perceived to be humanisms dangerously myopic exaltation of the human subject, advancing in its stead a more capable, ethical, inclusive, and
open subjectivity or collectivity (generally under the aegis of some form of hybridity). See Elaine L. Graham, Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2002); and N. Katherine
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics

200
In Mesmeric Revelation (1844), for instance, Poe presents through the visions of a dying mesmerized patient (Mr.
Vankirk) a picture of the universe in which all phenomena, both
physical and spiritual, consist of a common material substrate,
an ultimate, or unparticled matter, [that] not only permeates
all things but impels all thingsand thus is all things within itself. 12 Subsequently revealed to be, as in Spinozas philosophy,
a manifestation of spirit or God, this invisible unarticulated
matter is, Vankirk insists, still as fully matter as before (Mesmeric Revelation, p. 1,034), the physical medium through
which all constituents of the interconnected universe manifest
the universal impulse.13 Contra the affirmations of life and self
evident in contemporary mesmeric theory, however, Vankirk
claims that apprehension of this universal influence is achievable only in a mesmeric trance or death, because these states
allow for the supercession of our individual, rudimental bodies (Mesmeric Revelation, p. 1,038). In other words, the selfs
death (or its mesmeric equivalent) is the necessary cost of transitioning from a body capable of capturing only a small, contingent spectrum of the totality of being to a state of absolute
harmony and identification with the universe: in the ultimate,
unorganized life [i.e., death], the external world reaches the
whole body. . . . in unison with it . . . the whole body vibrates
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999). For a riposte to the paradoxical will-to-will
of much writing on the post-human, see Daniel T. OHara, Neither Gods nor Monsters: An Untimely Critique of the Post/Human Imagination, boundary 2, 30, no. 3
(2003), 10722. More locally, I am resisting the affirmative account of post-human
mimesis in Poe offered by James Berkley in Post-Human Mimesis and the Debunked
Machine: Reading Environmental Appropriation in Poes Maelzels Chess-Player and
The Man That Was Used Up, Comparative Literature Studies, 41 (2004), 356 76. Poe,
I argue, does not imagine the loss of the human into its environment only to reconstitute an improved subjectivity available to the individual self.
12 Edgar Allan Poe, Mesmeric Revelation, in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed.
Thomas Mabbott, et al., 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press,
1969 78), III, 1,033; further references are to this edition and appear in the text.
13 For a brilliant argument that Poe deflates spirituality by materializing it, see Joan
Dayan, Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poes Fiction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987).
Yet where Dayan posits that Poes insistence on physicality constitutes a rejection of all
spiritual unity and meaning, I would argue that it instead subverts the periods religious
orthodoxies only in order to embrace a material cosmic process that is itself infused
with the meaningfulness (though not the salvific potential) normally reserved for the
spiritual.

201
(pp. 1,03738); or, as Vankirk states earlier, when I am entranced the senses of my rudimental life are in abeyance, and
I perceive external things directly, without organs (p. 1,037;
emphasis added).14 As out-of-body, self-abeyant events, both
mesmerism and death offer literally direct experiences of
uni[ty] with the cosmos. Vankirk, however, just before he dies,
makes clear that the difference between normal, rudimental
senses and the sensations of the ultimate life is one of degree
rather than kind; both states bodily register the universes vibrations, even if it is only in the state of ultimate life that one
recognizes what the sensations portend: the conjunction of sensor and sensed in the unity of the unparticled matter. Whether
one is alive or dead, awake or entranced, sensations mark the
immediacy of congress and the reciprocity of identity between
sensible universe and sensing subject by blurring the line that
separates the two; sensations, that is, mark the bodys destabilizing encounter with its uncannily identical beyond.15 Mesmeric
Revelation underscores this point by making subject and object
indistinguishable in the same moment that self and not-self are
collapsed into a common unity, in the same space where external things [are perceived] directly.
Like Poes mesmeric tales, Eureka combines empiricist inquiry and transcendent insight, offering a material physics of
the spiritual relation between self and universe by showing
the constitutive imbrication of the two, the interdependencecum-convergence of subject and object.16 In short, Eureka is
14 Although the implications of the parallel are beyond the scope of this essay, there
is an uncanny resemblance between Vankirks vision of the ultimate life and Gilles
Deleuze and Flix Guattaris description of the body without organs.
15 For a different account of the significance of sensations in Poes work, see David
Leverenz, Spanking the Master: Mind-Body Crossings in Poes Sensationalism, in
A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 2001), pp. 95127.
16 Eurekas mixture of scientific factuality and spiritual inspiration is made explicit in
the balance between the preface (What I here propound is true:therefore it cannot
die) and the dedication (to those who feel rather than to those who thinkto the
dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities) (Edgar Allan Poe,
preface to Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe, in Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry
and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn [New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984],
p. 1,259; further references are to this edition and appear in the text). Despite the poetic form, Poe never suggests that the science of Eureka is inaccurate. Many critics of the

202
Mesmeric Revelation writ large and as a scientific tractthe

expansion of mesmeric principles to their natural, universal
limits.17 An ontology couched within a cosmology, Eureka asserts that the universe began with Gods self-differentiation into
a diffuse nervous system (i.e., the multiplicity of all phenomenal things, including the human) and will end in an inevitable
re-collapse into restored unity, a process already evident now
in gravity. As in mesmerism, then, Eureka presents external
influence as the necessary corollary to the assumption of ubiquitous (meta)physical interconnection: Every atom . . . attracts
every other atom, both of its own and of every other body (Eureka,
p. 1,284).18 Because of this spiritualized gravity (with which
tale, however, claim that Eureka is either a serious attempt at scientific knowledge with
rhetorical flourishes to mask its logical deficiencies (see Peter Swirski, Between Literature
and Science: Poe, Lem, and Explorations in Aesthetics, Cognitive Science, and Literary Knowledge [Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens Univ. Press, 2000]) or an artwork more
interested in aesthetic pleasure than scientific truth (see Josef Jar`ab, Edgar Allan Poes
Literary Strivings: How to Sell Beauty When Truth is a Bore, in POEtic Effect and Cultural Discourses, ed. Hermann Josef Schnackertz [Heidelberg: Universittsverlag Winter,
2003], pp. 51 60). More convincing are the analyses (such as Joseph N. Riddel, Purloined Letters: Originality and Repetition in American Literature, ed. Mark Bauerlein [Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1995]; and John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics:
The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance [New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press, 1980]) that abandon such binaries in favor of acknowledging Poes synthetic approach, one capacious enough to celebrate the Schellingian intuitive leaps of
the soul by which the mere perception of facts are suddenly comprehended as Law
(Poe, Eureka, pp. 1,264, 1,265). Thus, Eureka does not undermine its own authority by
covertly presenting intuitions as facts, as Michael J. S. Williams has claimed (see A World
of Words: Language and Displacement in the Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe [Durham, N.C.: Duke
Univ. Press, 1988]); instead, it openly stakes its authority on the assumption that intuitions are equal if not superior to facts.
17 Poe viewed Eureka as seriously as he did the mesmeric tales. He famously wrote to
his mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, on 7 July 1849, shortly before his death: I have no
desire to live since I have done Eureka. I could accomplish nothing more (Letters, II,
452). To this we can add Poes statements in a 29 February 1848 letter to George W.
Eveleth: you will recognize the novelty & moment of my views. What I have propounded
will (in good time) revolutionize the world of Physical & Metaphysical Science. I say
this calmlybut I say it (Letters, II, 362). I must disagree, therefore, with Dayans judgment that to read Eureka as actually suggesting a basis of unity rather than as a parodic
savaging of the same is to become victim to our own all-too-human desire for unity,
permanence, or substance (Dayan, Fables of Mind, p. 8). Similarly, I cannot concur with
Harold Beavers classification of Eureka as a hoax (see Beaver, introduction to The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Beaver [London: Penguin, 1976], p. xvi).
18 For the scientific sources upon which Poe here draws, see Margaret Altertons still
relevant Origins of Poes Critical Theory (Iowa City: University of Iowa, 1925).

203
Isaac Newton himself would have been sympathetic), all things

of the universe are related not only in their common origin but
also immediately in the present, across time and space, in the
infinite interactions taking place between every atom in the
universe as they fall back toward unityso much so that even
the displace[ment] . . . [of a] microscopial speck of dust . . .
shakes the Moon in her path . . . [and] alters forever the destiny of the multitudinous myriads of stars (Eureka, p. 1,286).
Consequently, no-thing is independent or autonomous, nothing fixed or stable.
And this includes us. To illustrate the pointthat gravity
necessitates the eventual convergence of universe and individualPoe rhetorically conflates celestial bodies and human
ones, claiming that stellar bodies and bodies on the Earth
mutually attract one another (Eureka, p. 1,328). Grammatically
collapsing selves and worlds into a single term (bodies) is
significant, then, because it mirrors the parallel, physical collapse occurring in the material universe. What the conflation
demonstrates most generally is that we are not exempt from the
things happening around us. Indeed, Eureka argues, in being
open to being affected by bodies not our own, we inevitably become something other than what we supposed ourselves to be,
something less self-sovereign because more externally determined. Contact with the larger universe, in other words, estranges our bodies from our selves. And though gravity is the
most obvious indication of this irrevocable, logical telos (the return to unity through the revocation of individuality), it is not
the only means of apprehending this fate; in fact, innate within
our consciousness is a latent knowledge of our future destiny.
Even more startling, we are not alone in this knowledge; in Poes
panpsychic universe, all creatures are conscious of their
(d)evolution:
All . . . creaturesallthose whom you term animate, as well as
those to which you deny life for no better reason than that you
do not behold it in operationall . . . are . . . conscious Intelligences; conscious, first, of a proper identity; conscious, secondly
and by faint indeterminate glimpses, of an identity with the
Divine Being. . . . Of the two classes of consciousness, . . . the former will grow weaker, the latter stronger, . . . before these myri-

204
ads of individual Intelligences become blended . . . into One. . . .
individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness . . . Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel
himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch
when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah. In the
meantime bear in mind that all is LifeLifeLife within Life
the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine. (Eureka, pp. 1,358 59)
As Eurekas conclusion, this passage encapsulates the essays dominant themes: that the coherent identities of individual things (especially Man) ultimately will be lost in the final
reconstitution of God; that this is a transitional process whose
effects can be felt in the present; that we are not the only things
to feel it. Together, these ideas capture the exceeding strangeness of Eurekas universe. On the one hand, it makes us continuous with the godhead; but, on the other hand, it does so
only by reducing us to a mortal knowledge of our common
thingness. In revealing that inanimate and animate things
alike are all of a shared, divine substance, Eureka necessarily
eliminates our ontological distinction and, consequently, our
existence. In opposition, therefore, to the this-worldly optimism and anthropocentricism of its contemporaries, Eureka
echoes Vankirk in making our deaththe death of the individual, the death of the humana precondition of full transcendence. Poe notes: in order to comprehend what [God] is,
we should have to be God ourselves (Eureka, p. 1,276)and,
for Poe, we can only become God when we are no more;
something survives our fatal convergence into One, but it is
not us. In Poes universe, identity can only be born in the moment that difference is buried, when gravity yields the grave.19
19 See Irwin, American Hieroglyphics; Jonathan Auerbach, The Romance of Failure: FirstPerson Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989); Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (New York: HarperCollins, 1991); Dennis Pahl, Architects of the Abyss: The Indeterminate Fictions of Poe,
Hawthorne, and Melville (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1989); and Evan Carton, The
Rhetoric of American Romance: Dialectic and Identity in Emerson, Dickinson, Poe, and Hawthorne
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985). These critics all have discussed how Eureka makes death a precondition for knowledge, but they do so in order then to offer either deconstructionist or psychoanalytic arguments that diverge from the point that
I believe Poe is making here about the material basis of such absolute identification.

205
The supposedly individual self, actually coextensive with

the universe, is thus both more (God) and less (an atom) than
itself, but always already different from itself. What Eureka effects, then, is a transition from digital/synchronic conceptions
of self and other to an analogic/diachronic understanding that
cancels such absolute divisions by illustrating their inevitable
flux between individuation and identity. It bears repeating, however, that despite the potentially auspicious resonances of this
assertion, Poe makes clear that we cannot have a positive relation to such a circumstance: we cannot put it to use, be elevated by it, pray to it, or even taken solace from it; we cannot
even survive it. We can only be (dis)integrated by it. Thus,
though the general tone of Eureka is one of ecstatic insight, there
is yet a pervasive sense of the sinister fate awaiting us. Poe
writes of spiritual shadows, phantoms of processes completed
long in the Past, and Memories that haunt us during our Youth,
all of which sometimes pursue us even into our Manhood:
assum[ing] less and less indefinite shapes:now and then
speak[ing] to us with low voices (Eureka, pp. 1,356, 1,321,
1,357). Indeed, Poe claims, We walk about . . . encompassed by
dim but ever present Memories of a Destiny more vastvery distant in the by-gone time, and infinitely awful (p. 1,356). These
memories, Poe suggests, are of our past unity, our existence
prior to our differentiation from One, and are therefore also
necessarily omens of our future destiny. The temporality inherent to a memory that is simultaneously a prophesy speaks to
the fact that our ostensibly individual lives are bracketed by a
nondifferentiated mode of being. It also illustrates that we are
not truly independent even in this life; these shadows and
memories speak to, pursue, and haunt us in the present, reminding/foretelling us of our irrevocable/inevitable
past/future loss of self. In other words, we never are (alone).
Such a scenario should sound familiar: it is one that Poes
tales obsessively rehearse. Time and again, Poes characters are
haunted by the knowledge of something more vastand
infinitely awful; they are overwhelmed by the sense that there
is something more than that which they can immediately apprehend, something that is a matter of life and death. In Poes tales,
though, the ephemeral whispers of Eureka assume material

206
bodies: shadows take flesh; phantoms become palpable realities; incorporeal thoughts assume less and less indefinite
shapes. Yet these now-tangible places and things do the same
work as Eurekas whispered memories: they speak to us with low
voices about our future, they precipitate an encounter with that
which is beyond us. As localized instantiations of the fatal effect of other bodies on our own, the myriad forms in Poes tales
thus concretize and particularize the general cosmological narrative outlined in Eureka: individual entities subjected to the
influence of their larger environments, until a final collapse cancels their differentiation. Therefore, though written at the end
of Poes life, well after his most prolific period of producing
short fiction, Eureka can be read as retroactively theorizing in
broad philosophical strokes the consistent (meta)physical laws
embodied in much of his earlier writings.20 From cats to comets
to teeth, normally innocuous things, now synecdochically invested with cosmic import, bring selves into submission to the
world, thus producing a state wherein the subject is itself reduced to a thing.
Martin Heideggers analysis in Being and Time (1953) of
the relation between Dasein and objects can help to clarify the
significance of what Poe is doing in these instances. Exploring
the paradox that everyday things (such as hammers or clocks)
are normally invisible as discrete items because of the familiarity and banality of their use by Dasein (things never show
themselves initially by themselves), Heidegger argues that such
things become conspicuous only when they resist the normative associations attached to them or when, more directly, they
defy being used.21 Whether it is because they are damaged, misplaced, or merely in the way, things demand confrontation
only when they are obstinately unhandy, when their handiness or purposiveness for Dasein is interrupted (Being and
20
For prior, differently valenced readings of Eurekas relation to the tales, see Dayan,
Fables of Mind; Carton, Rhetoric of American Romance; and Louis A. Renza, Edgar Allan Poe,
Wallace Stevens, and the Poetics of American Privacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ.
Press, 2002).
21 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1996), pp. 64, 68.

207
Time, p. 69). What is important about this interruption is that

it briefly suspends Daseins normal being-in-the-world by
short-circuiting Daseins ability to tak[e] care of things (Being
and Time, p. 71), which, for Heidegger, has deep implications.
Because of the irrevocable interconnection between Dasein
and environment (indeed their mutual definition), if Daseins
being-in-the-world were disrupted in more than a momentary
way by the insubordination of things (something that Heidegger does not explore), then Daseins fundamental structure,
or basic ontological constitution (Being and Time, pp. 37, 181),
would by definition be disrupted, thus precluding it from remaining Dasein.
Although it may seem odd to reference Heidegger when
discussing Poe, both writers examine how aberrations from the
normal make visible or uncoverthat which was previously
unseen. And both are concerned with the ontological stakes of
everyday pragmata (Being and Time, p. 64) and the mutual constitution of self and world in a shared unity of Being that they reveal. Despite this, however, the authors arrive at illustratively divergent conclusions. Though they agree that neither self nor
world exist prior to their encounter, Poe refuses to grant priority
to humanity/Dasein in the intersection, as Heidegger does.22
Indeed, Poes tales invert Heideggers teleology of the relation
between the ontological being of Dasein and the ontic being of
objects: Poe makes objects significant because of their resistance
to and canceling (rather than furtherance or explanation) of human being. Moreover, for Poe this resistance by things raises the
unsettling possibility that human intelligence is not the only
consciousness-of-being extant within the universe, potentially
not even the highest (a conceptual impossibility for early Heidegger). Poe presents things as diverse as landscapes, animals,
and atoms as sentient and willfully antagonistic, consciously
thinking of, manipulating, and destroying us.
22 The reductive conflation of the terms humanity and/or self with Dasein is not
strictly fair to Heideggers usage. Insofar as Heidegger does present Dasein as the particular kind of being exclusive to humankind, however, this approximation will serve
for the purposes of illustration required here.

208
Thus, rather than asserting their presence only when unhandy (for Heidegger being unusable merely reinscribes the
fact that things exist for persons), Poes things attain prominence by forcefully propelling themselves from the indiscernability of the material background to the hypervisibility of
peoples lives, before dragging them back to the abyss of indistinction (Being and Time, p. 69). Such dramatic interventions
force people to recognize that things are objectively present
(p. 69), actively disabling their mastery of and being in the
world. Where Heidegger wants to eschew theoretically considering things independently of their utility or handiness to Dasein as material for living (Being and Time, pp. 68, 64), Poe
wants to demystify the illusions of independence and anthropocentrism by revealing there to be only one material of life,
one in which humanity and individual selves are lost in, or
folded into, their others.23 Indeed, it is the moment of this entropic relapse into the common indistinction of thingness (for
both objects and subjects) that makes individual forms
perceptible at allthus Vankirk is most aware of his body when
he senses it being absorbed into the universe. And Poe advances
this fusion-via-annihilation as the standard of subject-object relations in the world. Individual, discrete things stand-in for, are
the visible reminders/remainders of, materiality as such, the
common denominator that reveals a mutual origin and foretells
a shared, future collapse with the perceiving subject. Like the
more transparent universal processes of Eureka or the mesmeric
tales, the things of Poes other writings, protean embodiments of
cosmic forces, attack the integrity of characters coherent, autonomous identities, rending them apart (rendering them a
part) and revealing them to be of the same constitution as, subject to the same forces as, continuous with rather than discrete
from, unified Being. Such things, in other words, do violence to
us. Put another way, Poes tales ask: what happens when Hei-
23 Arrogating ontological privilege, or at least distinction, to the human is, of

course, not exclusive to Heidegger. It should also be noted that although Poe does
trouble the assumption of humanitys exalted, differential status, he is not entirely exempt from anthropocentrism; he is still concerned with the human, even if only in its
disappearance.

209
deggers hammer hammers us? Or when a raven not only

speaks, but speaks to us in the negative?24
These are the kinds of questions asked recently in sociological rather than ontological terms by Bill Brown, who, like
Heidegger, notes that behind objects with socially inscribed
meanings, interpretive codes, and significations are opaque
things, often invisible until they stop working for us. 25 While
acknowledging the evasiveness of its subjectthe Thing becomes the most compelling name for that enigma that can only
be encircled and which the object (by its presence) necessarily
negates (Thing Theory, p. 5)Browns thing theory yet
suggests that the (un)settling of the subjects knowledge of the
object, indeed the (de)stabilization of the very notions humanity, self, subject, and object, is not unidirectional, not
solely the province of the human; things, too, play a role in the
setting-up/upsetting of our orders. And this spectral yet consequential quality of Browns things nicely accords with Poes tales,
which present the outcomes of objects asserting themselves as
things, breaking away from their normative associations and
uses in order to exist in spaces of estrangement and inverted
power relations. Unlike other nineteenth-century discourses
(such as mesmerism and spiritualism) that invested physical
things (e.g., therapeutic crystals) with metaphysical weight only
to enlist them in the interests of human subjects, Poe articulates
a process wherein objects become things working toward the
subjects end rather than ends. Thus, whereas Eureka presents a
sweeping, post-human exhibition of the selfs unification with
the universe, the tales show the all-too-human, often terrifying
process of the self becoming subject to the things around it
becoming, as it were, a thing it-self.
24 For Heideggers exposition of how hammers further the being of Dasein, see Being and Time, pp. 64 65.
25 Brown argues that we can only begin to confront the thingness of objects when
they stop working for us . . . when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. The
story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to
the human subject (Bill Brown, Thing Theory, Critical Inquiry, 28 [2001], 4). Although Brown does not here explicitly reference Heidegger, he does acknowledge the
relation in other writings.

210
Consider, for instance, Ligeia (1838). Given its epigraphwhich reads in part, God is but a great will pervading
all things. . . . Man doth not yield himself to . . . death . . . save
only through the weakness of his feeble will 26and given the
standard interpretation of the story as emblematic of an indomitable will enabling even the survival of death, it may seem
counterintuitive to include the tale in a discussion on the death
of individuals.27 The difficulty is only superficial, however. The
tales epigraph, for instance, anticipates almost verbatim Eurekas pantheistic assertion of God pervading all things, including the will of Man. And, as we have seen, such a universal interconnection works to cancel the survival of individual selves.
Indeed, from the tales first page, the narrators existence as an
independent entity is endangered, as Ligeia is characterized as
enthralling and pass[ing] . . . into [the narrators] spirit
(Ligeia, pp. 310, 314); the narrator even admits, I was
sufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy to resign myself . . .
to her guidance (p. 316). Reproducing the structure of the
mesmeric sance, the narrator literally loses himself in Ligeias
eyes, his I into her eye.28
In order to see how this represents a loss of selves rather
than their consummation, we can follow the narrators example
and pause for a moment on (or within) Ligeias eyes. To him
they resemble the twin stars of Leda and almost recall to
memory something long forgotten (Ligeia, p. 313). But he is
not able, in the end, to remember what this something is,
leading him to repeatedly ask what was it? regarding that
which lay far within the pupils of [his] beloved (pp. 314, 313).
26 Edgar Allan Poe, Ligeia, in Collected Works, II, 310; further references are to this
edition and appear in the text.
27 See, for instance, Arthur Hobson Quinns classic Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1941), pp. 269 70; and J. Gerald Kennedy,
Poe, Ligeia, and the Problem of Dying Women, in New Essays on Poes Major Tales, ed.
Kenneth Silverman (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 11329.
28 Harold Bloom reads Poes work in general, and Ligeia in particular, as being
centered on psychological absorption and pathological fantasies of incorporation
(see Bloom, introduction to The Tales of Poe, ed. Bloom [New York: Chelsea House,
1987], p. 8). I concur with Blooms attention to absorption but define it in material
rather than psychological terms.

211
Groping for an answer, the narrator compares looking into

Ligeias eyes with viewing the commonest objects of the universe: a vine, a moth, a stream, a meteor, the glances
of unusually aged people, books, and stringed instruments
(p. 314). What unifies these things? Some form of arcane vital
energy? Eternal process? In either case they would mirror
Ligeias indefatigable will to survive death. But if this is true,
then their relation inexorably depersonalizes Ligeia insofar as
her defining characteristic is found to be nothing less than the
common nature of the universe itself. Perhaps, then, the association of these disparate things and Ligeia registers a trace of
their shared material and spiritual origin and their resultant interconnected existence in the present; perhaps they are the
physical clues to the aforementioned something long forgotten, or to Eurekas spiritual shadows and Memories of a Destiny
more vast. Perhaps these things, in other words, are the forensic evidence of what Eureka describes as Gods past self-dispersal
and eventual reconstitution, reminders of our origin and fate.
Regardless of the answer, the list illustrates that seemingly individual selves actually are equivalent to assemblages of similarly
common things, items in a catalog of like objects.
Ligeias eyes, only the most prominent feature of a body
that the narrator comprehensively anatomizes, thus testify neither to personal uniqueness nor to a peculiarly human quality,
but to their shared essence, even identity, with the universe;
even the spherical form of her eyes is patterned tellingly on nonhuman spheres of a larger scale: stars and cosmos. These comparisons, then, suggest a circle of analogies (Ligeia, p. 314;
emphasis added)a figural relationbecause they refer to a
genealogical resemblance: her large and luminous orbs (a recurrent description) are rhetorically and materially related to
the heavenly orbs above her. Again, what this connection reveals
is not what makes Ligeia exceptional but what makes her common (equivalent to the commonest objects of the universe);
or, if she is exceptional, then it is by the degree to which her
commonality is evident. Indeed, the tale as a whole denies individuality to its characters by folding discrete persons into their
putative others: the narrator into Ligeia, Ligeia into the indistinction of the universe of kindred things.

212
Ligeia, uncannily attuned to this process, pens a macabre

poem about it from her deathbed. Describing the predestined
fate of humans in the language of a staged tragedy entitled
Man, her verses depict a spectral orchestra playing the music
of the spheres; characterize humanity as Mimes and puppets controlled by vast formless things, chas[ing] but never
seiz[ing] the Phantom they seek; and conceive of life as a
circle that ever returneth in / To the self-same spot, ostensibly
the selfs return to indistinction via the Conqueror Worm
(Ligeia, pp. 318 19). With the soul of the plot being Madness, Horror, and Sin (p. 319), the poem calculates the human cost of Eurekas reversion of selves back to the self-same
spot, the space of their origin. What Eureka characterizes as a
harmonious fading of self into universe (even if the self never
benefits from the union), Ligeia unabashedly presents as a
painful farce on the blind impotence and impermanence of humanity. The physical motion is the same, the emotion differs.29
In both works, we are out of control of ourselves.
Even Ligeias return from death, which apparently overthrows the Conqueror Worms reign, is not an assertion of the
durability of individuality but an exemplification of the forces
obliterating it. Amid the hideous and uneasy animation of a
tapestry ambiguously moved by either spirit or wind, and the
phantasmagoric influences of the chamber itself (Ligeia,
pp. 32224), the narrators new wife, Rowena, dies, and by degrees her body is transformed into that of Ligeia, who rises again
to life. But what does it mean to say that Ligeia has returned?
Who or what is Ligeia? At the beginning of the tale the narrator
confesses knowing neither how he met her nor her paternal
name (p. 311). And aside from the above physical descriptions,
which veer to abstract comparisons with inanimate things,
Ligeia is characterized only as having an immense amount of
29
The difference in affect is attributable to a rigid economy in Poes writing: seeing

or experiencing the telos of universal process inevitably comes at the cost of ones individual life (Ligeia); while still a putative individual, one can only feel (both physically
and spiritually) the terror of the selfs disintegration without understanding it
(Ligeias narrator). The human dramas of the tales thus enact, but conceal behind
their affects, the ahuman mechanics of Eureka.

213
learning in transcendentalism, a gigantic volition, and,

when nearing death, a wild desire for life,for lifebut for
life (pp. 31517). Indeed, the only words we hear her speak
(Man doth not yield . . . to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save
only through the weakness of his feeble will) echo the tales epigraph, which is attributed to someone else entirely (pp. 319,
310). In every way, then, Ligeia labors to de-individualize
Ligeia by denying her qualities other than those of the universe;
she is merely a corporealization of transcendentalism. Embodying Eurekas Divine Volition and LifeLifeLife within
Life, Ligeia is an abstraction made concrete. What survives
death, therefore, is not a person but an impersonal principle.
What returns from the grave is Life itself.
If Ligeia makes Ligeia not a person but a common thing
portending our ontological (dis)integration, then The Fall of
the House of Usher, written only a year later, extends this
office to even more things in our lives, picturing yet more ways
in which we are subjects of/to our surroundings. Indeed, the
story offers numerous synecdochic examples of the concrete
forms that universal principle can assume, the most prominent
of which is, of course, the House itself. Upon first arriving, the
narrator immediately registers the unnerv[ing] lifelikeness of
the place: The melancholy House of Usher twice is said to
have vacant eye-like windows; indoors, too, things have their
own atmosphere of sorrow and irredeemable gloom that
h[angs] over and pervade[s] all. 30 The affective resonance of
the location leads the narrator to question, in a manner reminiscent of Ligeias husband, What was it . . . that so unnerved
me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? (House of
Usher, p. 397). Though he does not arrive at a conclusive answer, he entertains a strange fancy that the environs are
somehow communally alive in their shared decay: about the
whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves . . . an atmosphere which had no affinity with
the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed
30 Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, in Collected Works, II, 39798,
401; further references are to this edition and appear in the text.

214
trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarna pestilent and
mystic vapor (pp. 399 400).
Even more unnerving, the houses atmosphere quickly
becomes the narrators own: with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervade[s] the narrators
spirit, resulting in an utter depression of soul analogous to
the bitter lapse into every-day life of waking from an opium
dream (House of Usher, p. 397). This disruption of the narrators putatively autonomous self through a confrontation with
an object of every-day life exhibits the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed [him] (p. 399). The narrator, in other
words, is not detached from the scene he surveys. Indeed, the
fact that the peculiar affect of the scene becomes the narrators own, affecting him even physically, forces him to admit that
there are combinations of . . . natural objects which have the
power of thus affecting us (p. 398). Though analysis of this
power lies . . . beyond our depth (p. 398), the fact that the narrator can feel a power in his surroundings at all suggests that
the two are interrelated to an extent that complicates their differentiation. That affects or atmospheres might actually reside
in things and then possess persons, rather than the other way
around, is a disconcerting propositionbut it is that one the
tale embodies.
All of this could still be discounted as the narrators imaginative projections were it not for what follows. Literalizing the
indistinguishability of building and inhabitants inherent to the
equivocal appellation of the House of Usher, the story displays the effects of the mutual influence of structure and lineage over the long lapse of centuries, a reciprocal imbrication made all the more incestuous because the very ancient
family tree never put forth . . . any enduring branch that lived
beyond the mansions walls (House of Usher, pp. 398 99).
Suffering equally from lines that are absences (the branchless
family tree; the fissure reaching from the top of the houses
roof to its foundation), the house and its eponymous owners
are connected by a common rupture that foreshadows their
collapse into one another. And Roderick Usher, last of the family line, knows it or rather, he senses it. Indeed, Rodericks
self-avowed defining characteristic, and why he calls the narra-

215
tor to visit him, is a hysterical form of oversensitivity, an excessive nervous agitation:

the nature of his malady. . . . was . . . a constitutional and a family
evil . . . a mere nervous affection. . . . It displayed itself in a host
of unnatural sensations. . . . He suffered much from a morbid
acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the
odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by
even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these
from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror. (pp. 4023)
Here is a pathology conducive if not to mental health then at

least to recognizing the preeminence of things in our lives. Rodericks morbidly acute senses subject him to his environment,
reducing him (and countless past generations of his family) to
being a dependent effect of his surroundings.31 The result, then,
of Rodericks hyperattuned senses is not an exaltation of the
subject and its powers but an attenuation of him and them, the
production of a state of being that threatens his life by overwhelming it with context. Roderick himself anticipates the inescapable result of living in constant terror of even the most
trivial thing: I shall perish . . . I must perish (p. 403).
We soon discover that this oversensitivity, and the threat to
self that it makes visible, originates in Rodericks relationship
with his ancestral house:
He was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard
to the dwelling which he tenanted, and whence, for many years,
he had never ventured forthin regard to an influence whose
supposititious force was conveyed in terms too shadowy here to
be re-statedan influence which some peculiarities in the mere
form and substance of his family mansion, had, by dint of long
31 We can compare the narrators own monomania in Berenice (1835): [it]
consisted in a morbid irritability of those properties of the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive. . . . [toward] the most ordinary objects of the universe
(Edgar Allan Poe, Berenice, in Collected Works, II, 211). The narrator stresses that this
absorption is not based in speculative interest or imagination but is instead a purely
sensory fixation on an invariably frivolous object (p. 212), such as Berenices teeth,
which have a sensitive and sentient power, and, even when unassisted by the lips, a capability of moral expression (p. 216).

216
sufferance . . . obtained over his spiritan effect which the
physique of the gray walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into
which they all looked down, had, at length, brought about upon
the morale of his existence. (House of Usher, p. 403)
Baldly presenting the degree of influence that places have

over persons, this passage stresses Rodericks consciousness of
the causal link between the mere form and substance of his
family mansion and the morale of his existence. He knows
that his body and spirit are nothing more than conditional,
ephemeral effects of the physique of the gray walls and turrets.
This dominion of the house, its force, is subsequently
revealed to originate in its vitality, even its consciousness, as
Ushers general belief in the sentience of all vegetable things.
. . . assume[s] a more daring character, and trespasse[s] . . . upon
the kingdom of inorganization:
The conditions of the sentience had been . . . fulfilled in the
method of collocation of these stonesin the order of their
arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them . . . above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. Its evidencethe evidence of the sentience
was to be seen . . . in the gradual yet certain condensation of
an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls. The
result was discoverable . . . in that silent, yet importunate and
terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies
of his family, and which made him . . . what he was. (House of
Usher, p. 408)
An emblem of the ubiquity of life and sentience, the panpsychic

house gives form to the nebulous universals presented in Eureka,
concretizing that essays broad assertion of the interconnection
and interinfluence consequent upon material unity. Fusing
stones, fungi, trees, tarn, temporal duration (centuries), and
observer, the scene thus demonstrates Eurekas collocation of
seemingly discrete things, including persons, into one (in)organic whole. The Usher family, then, rather than freely tenanting the building, are themselves possessed by the houses atmosphere; though Roderick is the presumed master of the

217
ancestral manor, it is found to be sovereign over him: the

moldering house mould[s] the familys destiny and ma[kes]
Roderick what he [is].
But what exactly is threatening about this understanding?
Whence the horror and terror? Roderick, at least, feels that
universal life threatens his own being (I shall perish . . . I must
perish). And the story proves his premonition correct: Roderick dies at the tales end. But why? The idea that other things
having life and sentience should necessarily endanger our own
is perhaps confusing, especially given the generally positive
tenor of panpsychic discourse at the time (as represented in
Rodericks own library).32 But insofar as human life and sentience are predicated upon assumptions of exclusivity and preeminence, it makes sense that we would be disturbed if our
defining characteristics were found common. Moreover, in addition to lessening our ontological distinctiveness, Poes
panpsychism calls into question our autonomy; it is no longer
clear in what sense we can be said to exist as independent beings once our physical, mental, and spiritual lives are revealed
to be extensions of our now-sentient environments. In Poes
universe, sovereignty is necessarily an exclusive principle, pertaining either to a universe or a self, but never to both. The
houses consciousness thus upsets the integrity and individuality of Rodericks own mind by becoming its center, displacing
its hermetic self-centerednessa fact indicated by the ready
slippage between Rodericks self-consciousness of his malady
and his obsessive consciousness of the consciousnesses of other
things. For Poe the unity of the environment, its peculiar atmosphere of [its] own, comes at the cost of the individuality
of the particular things that comprise it. With unity there is
scarcity, with singularity there is indistinction. For the Ushers,
therefore, there is extinction.
32 The first recorded use of the word panpsychism in the Oxford English Dictionary
is from 1879, but the idea itselfthat everything in the universe has some degree of
mental functioningwas circulating for some time previously. See, for example, Mabbotts note on the real published works collected in the fictional Usher library (see Collected Works, II, 419, n. 15), as well as one book not included: Gustav Fechners Nanna,
or On the Mental Life of Plants (1848). See also David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).

218
The canonical interpretation of this conjunction of house

and family is that it somehow manifests the psychological
pathologies of Roderick, the narrator, or Poe (or of all three).33
This answer is unsatisfying, however, inasmuch as it refuses to
countenance what the tale says things do and shows things doing; this interpretation bows to less strange because more human- or self-centric conventions, the very conventions that the
tale undermines. Roderick may be insane, and he may infect
the narrator with his insanity, but this is an effect rather than a
cause of the fantastical phenomena the story presents. As the
narrator only partially realizes, much, if not all of what [he]
felt, was due to the bewildering influence of the gloomy furniture of the room (House of Usher, p. 411). Believing in the
sentience of all vegetable things or the influence of . . . furniture is not in itself insane in Poes universe, but it may cause
insanity one symptom of the estrangement from self that
contact with things produces.34 Alternatively, insanity or a morbid acuteness of the senses may actually enable apprehension of the normally unperceived nature of our relationship to
the things about us, thus serving much the same function as
other altered states that disrupt normative self-identity in Poes
fiction (such as mesmeric trances, opium reveries, and death).35
In either case, things are central to both the characters and the
tales because they do not allow us to escape their influence.
Poe thus demonstrates that the relationship between self and
world is defined not by their distance (whether psychical, lin33 Rather than the degenerative state of the House of Usher being a projection of
the diseased mind of its tenant, as J. Gerald Kennedy, among others, claims (see
Kennedy, Introduction: Poe in Our Time, in A Historical Guide, pp. 317), I believe
that Poe presents the opposite scenario: the house directly effecting and (dis)ordering
the mind that is subject to it (and a subject of it). Rather than receiving the projections
of selves, things here project onto selves.
34 This reading counters Lawrence Buells assertion that Poe implicitly denounces
Rodericks Gothic pantheism as a form of madness incompatible with Poes own valorization of rationalism (see Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard
Univ. Press, 1995], p. 188).
35 See Eleonora (1841) and The Pit and the Pendulum (1842) for other examples in Poes writings of how both insanity and swoons put the conscious, integral self
in abeyance, thus facilitating apprehension of the selfs dissolution by the larger
universe.

219
guistic, or physical) but by their infinite proximity or artificial

differentiation.36
My reading has thus far ignored what much recent criticism
on Usher has seized upon: Rodericks relationship with Madeline.37 I do not wish to slight the significance of the pairing, but
I will depart from previous accounts of it. Roderick and Madeline are said to be twins of striking similitude, but the resemblance is discovered by the narrator only following Madelines
death (House of Usher, p. 410). Indeed, aside from a spectral
appearance at the beginning of the story at the exact moment in
which Roderick speaks of her imminent decease (p. 404),
Madeline is absent from most of the tale, both physiologically
(she is cataleptic) and spatially (she is confined to bed, out of
view), becoming truly present only in death. Once she becomes
a corpse, however, once a thing like Ligeia rather than a person, her presence is felt everywhere. Roderick, especially, senses
his sisters return. Due no doubt in part to the sympathies of a
scarcely intelligible nature [that] had always existed between
them (p. 410), and in part to his acute hypersensitivity, Roderick hears Madelines efforts at escaping her tomb for days. And
at the last moments of her approach, his body itself begins to
register Madelines proximity, as he starts rock[ing] from side
to side with a gentle yet constant and uniform sway (p. 415).
Like the sympathy between proximate bodies in Eureka, Madelines advance toward her brother changes the motion of his
body (House of Usher, p. 415). And like Eurekas final, in36 While Scott Peeples reads into Poes attention to house design an authorial
metapractice (Poe uses the house to reflect upon literary structures), my own interpretation would replace literary with material (see Peeples, Poes Constructiveness and The Fall of the House of Usher, in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan
Poe, ed. Kevin J. Hayes [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002], p. 180). In other
words, Peeples wants, paradoxically, to deconstruct the story by making the House an
allegory for the inevitable collapse of figuration, but I would argue that the Houses literal de-construction embodies for Poe the inevitable tendency of matter, including persons, to collapse into unified indistinction.
37 See, for example, John Allison, Coleridgean Self-Development: Entrapment and
Incest in The Fall of the House of Usher, South Central Review, 5, no. 1 (1988), 40 47;
Robert Hoggard, Pregnant Thoughts on The Fall of the House of Usher, University
of Mississippi Studies in English, n.s. 7 (1989), 118 20; and Leila S. May, Sympathies of
a Scarcely Intelligible Nature: The Brother-Sister Bond in Poes Fall of the House of
Usher, Studies in Short Fiction, 30 (1993), 38796.

220
evitable collapse of differentiated materiality into a common

embrace of indistinction, Madelines [falling] heavily inward
upon the person of her brother brings both her and Roderick
to the ground as corpse[s] (House of Usher, pp. 416 17).
The subsequent collapse of the house only punctuates the absoluteness of the convergence. Resonating with the language of
universal energies, a life-like whirlwind, a gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion, and an
electrical phenomena destroy the property, submerging it below the opaque waters of the tarn (pp. 41213). In a significant
anticipation of Eureka, only the blood-red moon remains over
the place where persons once were (House of Usher, p. 417).
The common thread throughout The Fall of the House
of Usher is the inwardness of identity. Rodericks nervous sensitivity to the mortal influence of a sentient environment,
Madelines inward fall onto her brother, and the houses final
collapse all trope the storys recurrent thematic of the inexorable return to unity of spiritually interconnected matter. In a
tale obsessed with linearity (genealogical lines, poetic lines,
sight lines, structural lines), the narrative traces how discrete
points finally coalesce back into a singularity. As a result, the
line that divides self from world, the ontological barrier visualized in the written I, is shown to be ultimately incapable of
withstanding the pressure of what lies without. The Ushers and
the House of Usher necessarily fall together because the logic
of The Fall of the House of Usher is that identity is borne out
in collapse and true unity is expressed in the erasure of distinction. The tale thus exemplifies the idea that, in Poes universe,
all unions are incestuous and issue in death.
In this fatal recognition of ones self in the world, we can see
that the universe predicated in Mesmeric Revelation and Eureka (and embodied in Ligeia and The Fall of the House of
Usher, as well as numerous other tales), though certainly systematic in its (dis)integration of individual humans, is neither
triumphantly nor redemptively post-human. Unlike the celebratory, self-affirming, and self-perpetuating syntheses of subject and object so commonly imagined in both nineteenthcentury (meta)physical discourse and in current optimistic
post-humanisms, both of which fantasize not the death of the

221
human subject but only its edifying transformation into something more, Poes nonproductive and unyielding vision of the
post-human insists on the overcoming of the subject by the object that it uncannily resembles, the loss of the putative individuals life to the world such that the I, too, becomes a thing; the
post-human for Poe, in other words, is Gothic rather than
utopic, something to be lived, if at all, by corpses rather than immortal persons. Thus, although he participates in his cultures
particular cosmontological imaginary, Poe represents an inassimilable negativity within that cultures twinned developmental
histories of the Human and the Individual, histories whose postmortems, despite the post-human, have yet to be written.38
Johns Hopkins University
ABSTRACT
Matthew A. Taylor, Edgar Allan Poes (Meta)physics: A Pre-History

of the Post-Human (pp. 193221)
Edgar Allan Poe partakes of a social imaginary pursuing a single, unified theory of the
physical and metaphysical. In this essay I examine how Poe, rather than following the
predominantly utopian, utilitarian, and self-affirming teleologies of many such contemporary discourses (mesmerism, spiritualism, etc.), pictures instead the unsettling
implications for human ontology consequent upon the idea that persons are less autonomous or sovereign entities than mutable effects of external, inhuman forces. Routing my discussion through a critical reading of Martin Heideggers Being and Time, I
argue that Poes cosmological poem-essay Eureka and much of his short fiction
including Ligeia and The Fall of the House of Usherpresent a model of the universe and of the natural world that actively erodes the distinctions separating humanity
from its physical environment, indeed that finally refuses the differentiation of subject
and object altogether. My essay provides a brief genealogy for this macabre literalization of contemporary theories of the universe in Poes writing and explores the implications that it has for a critical tradition (psychoanalytic, deconstructive, ideological)
largely invested in the selves rather than the surroundings of Poes tales.
Keywords: Edgar Allan Poe; Eureka; Ligeia; The Fall of the House
of Usher; mesmerism
38 For one account of the historical convergence of the discourses of individuality

and humanity, see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970), pp. 373 86.


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