The Poe Bug
Like the Infected of a certain movie, the influence of Edgar Allan Poe is highly contagious.By S.J. Chambers
Have you experienced these following symptoms: soaring soul, existential exigency, speaking in cryptically symbolic metaphor, vertigo caused by sublimity, vision heightened by chiaroscuro, dead-dwelling or head-swelling? Do you suffer from daydreaming reflex with reveries that include black birds, scents of an unseen censor or aberrant alliterative applications? If you have answered yes to more than one of these, you may be suffering from Poepathy. A terrible disease of the soul, characterized by the affectation of the imagination and its degenerate interaction with the secular world, Poepathy is derived from continual contact of the reader’s imagination with that of 19th- century American author, Edgar Allan Poe.
Born in 1809, Edgar Allan Poe
will turn 200 in 2009.
As his bicentennial approaches in 2009, the States are becoming exposed to the Poethogen again with an outpouring of movies and books celebrating Poe’s life and work. With celebration comes evaluation and many doubters will probably wonder “What’s the big deal?” All the hullabaloo surrounding Poe does not have to do so much with the man, but his legacy—the lineage of artists, writers and filmmakers who have contracted and spread Poe’s particular strain of dreaming.
Nothing better describes Poe’s vision than the alchemy of beauty and deformity, and it is underneath the suspense and terror encountered in Poe’s work where a diligent aesthetic festers. Not only are there elements of morality, beauty and psychosis, but pieces of biography as well.
It is well known that Poe married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia, at the age of 27, only to spend the decade of their marriage watching her cough herself to death from tuberculosis. Virginia was not the only woman Poe had to watch die. From birth, he watched those he most adored waste away from the same illness: his mother, his foster-mother and his brother. Amidst all this misery, Poe sought refuge in romanticism and learned how to climb out of the dismal verities of life with a ladder made of words. Torn between logic and dreams, Poe devised a world where he could both analyze life’s horrors and transform them into poetry.
What has made Poe so appealing over the centuries is his meticulous cause to an ambiguous effect--work carefully plotted but painted with sensuous imagery that leaves the story open to other possibilities. Poe enthusiasts dwell on Poe because of his potential. This potential hooks the susceptible pure Imagination and sends the enthusiast into the first fevers of Poe’s plague.
History of Poepathy
The first outbreak occurred, not in the United States as one would presume, but in Paris, France in 1847 when poet Charles Baudelaire stumbled upon a translation of “The Black Cat.” At this time in Baudelaire’s life, he had developed an aesthetic of ambiguous beauty where appealing to the senses created an ambient alternative to nature and reality. This concept would famously be expressed in his 1852 poetic work, Les Fleurs de Mal, but in 1847 Baudelaire feared misunderstanding until he discovered his aesthetic already successfully expressed by a man across the ocean.
Once he found his trans-Atlantic soulmate, he became obsessed. He studied English for four years solely to read and translate Poe’s work. When he heard of an American in Paris, he would track him down for questioning and impressions of Poe. He even prayed to Poe, as documented in his diary My Heart Laid Bare, and pooled most of his creative energy away from his own work and into writing, promoting and translating of Poe. With these endeavors circulating in the French intellectual mind, Poepathy became epidemic.
The disease was spread to Baudelaire’s protégé, Mallarmé, who, in turn, passed it to his disciples of the Symbolist movement, and so on through the decades until the fever broke in Surrealism. To the adherents of each movement, Edgar Allan Poe was a different man. With his ambiguous life and work translated, French artists were allowed to see Poe for how they wanted to see him, as Poe scholar Raymond Foye summarizes:
“ From Mallarmé on, interpretations of Poe diverge radically. The Symbolists…adopt the Poe of ordered, pragmatic, rational thought—the master of formal investigations and the fine art of reasoning. On the other hand, the Decadents…and the pre-Surrealists embrace the adventuresome Poe, the high priest of horror, mystery, imagination, dreams, drugs, and the disorders of the sensate mind. One particular quality in Poe’s writing took on a cardinal importance: what the Surrealists’ Andre Breton called convulsive beauty,— violent, shattering, involuntary, and inclusive of the erotic.” This concept of convulsive beauty would be the new mutation that transformed Poe from mere artistic influence into artistic material.
Cinematic Transfusions
Madeline Usher (Marguerite Gance)
under the spell of her husband's
artistry. Still from Jean Epstein's
silent THE FALL OF THE HOUSE
OF USHER.
Roderick Usher is diseased by art. He ignores his wife, Madeline, for the company of her portrait. Whenever she comes into his view, she becomes a posing drone who agonizes over her neglect and fatigue. When his painting is complete, she collapses and is believed dead. Usher reveals that he has hypnotized her and urges those around him not to bury her. They ignore him, thinking it is just more of his lunacy, and bury Madeline alive. True to Poe’s story, Roderick writhes under guilt and believes he can hear her stirring within her coffin. With the advent of a fierce storm, she escapes and returns to the house, trailing wind and fire behind her. Unlike the story, Madeline has not come to avenge herself, but to return to Usher, and they escape as their house collapses into ruins.
The compulsion of madness, destructive and ominous weather, as well as the running chiasmus of art destroying life are all elements of convulsive beauty that the Surrealists found within Poe.
Vincent Price in the 1960
Roger Corman film, THE FALL
OF THE HOUSE OF USHER.
This was the first in 8 films loosely
based on Poe's work.
With Poepathy now in the cinema, an artistic media most publicly available, the disease transferred from avant-garde esotericism and onto the pop-culture screen of American cinema via the famous Roger Corman/Vincent Price films. Both admirers of Poe, they set out to bring the King of the Macabre to the silver screen but were faced with lack of material. Poe’s short and ambiguous stories provided only kindling and no fuel to fill a full feature film. Therefore, stories like “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Raven” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” were revamped to the extent of becoming unrecognizable. Nevertheless, the Corman/Price films reestablished Poe in the American horror consciousness, as well as internationally. A total of 185 films and TV shows are listed on Internet Movie Database as having been made from Poe’s work, most of them as grossly derived from Poe’s original vision as the Corman/Price films. Given the infinite possibilities Poe’s work can suggest, the number will only grow, especially as 2009 approaches.
While films choose to rewrite Poe’s work, literature chose to expound upon his life. Roughly about 25 novels have been published about Poe. The most recent two, Matthew Pearl’s THE POE SHADOW, a New York Times Best Seller, and Louis Bayard’s THE PALE BLUE EYES, an Edgar Award nominee, both came out last summer. 2007 will see no less. This July, biographical speculation arrives on the silver screen. Stuart Gordon’s THE BLACK CAT will be released July 17 on DVD, and concern itself with the story behind the story. First aired in October of 2005 as part of Showtime’s MASTER OF HORRORS series, the film imagines the conditions and coincidences that created the horror tale.
Tim Burton with Vincent Price on the set of
EDWARD SCISSORHANDS. Burton has expressed
interest in doing a Poe film. Burton's Poepathy
has been on the screen before in his stop-animation
short, VINCENT. Although an homage to Price, the
young character pretends to mourn for his lost
Lenore and prefers to sit in the dark reading Poe's poems.
Broke, drunk and helpless at his dying wife’s side, Edgar Allan Poe, played by Jeffrey Combs, has writer’s block. Wrestling with frustrations both artistic and real, Poe begins to obsess over the black family cat, and the film delves into the overlapping of life and art that gave birth to “The Black Cat.” This winter, POE, a full-feature bio-pic directed and written by Sylvester Stallone is slated for release. As unlikely as it seems, Stallone has been obsessed with the poet for years. He first began talking about his bio-pic plans in 1977, when he revealed to Roger Ebert that he was “writing about Edgar Allan Poe and his child bride, Virginia. Only, I’ll make it about the genius of Poe, and not about the reality. About his spirit. Who wants the caustic realities of real life when fantasy is so much better?”
Since his 2005 Variety announcement, the project has been pushed back several times, perhaps to accommodate the Rambo and Rocky revivals. But according to the Internet Movie Database, filming began this past May for a Christmas release date. If he waits any longer than that, he may have to contend with a rival effort from Tim Burton, who publicly expressed in a 2006 IESB.net interview interest in filming a Poe biography. Likewise, Burton’s buddy and fellow Poe enthusiast, Johnny Depp is rumored to be looking at FOREVERMORE, a script written by Grant Boucher, a well-established visual-effects artist turned screenwriter.
According to an IESB script review of FOREVERMORE, Boucher’s script deals with a retrospective Poe on his deathbed. Through hallucinations, he relives the joys and terrors of his life in a place Boucher terms “Dreamland.” It sounds as if FOREVERMORE will take the same fantastic retreat into Poe’s genius as Stallone’s POE.
The facts and the case of Poepathy
Both FOREVERMORE and POE demonstrate the beauty and curse of Poepathy. On one hand, the inseparable marriage of Poe’s life and work lends itself to transcendent poignancy, as if Poe had been a walking poem. Yet, there is the tendency to over-romanticize Poe’s suffering as life imitating art. Since Baudelaire’s advocating of Poe the Poet, Poe the Man has faded behind his sensual images and gothic themes. It is no wonder some people think of Poe as an overestimated hack, because in a sense, he is overestimated. All of the elements of Poe that live on today are not truly Poe’s imagination, but what he inspired from others. It will be interesting to see by the Bicentennial, who it is America will celebrate. A man who overcame loss, poverty and alcoholism to become a young nation’s most original writer or the disease-carrying pathogen we know as the Poet?
It is something to consider, even without a cultural revival, because Poepathy afflicts millions of readers around the world. It is a maddening pestilence with no cure and no treatments, one simply outgrows it or lives with it until death, nursing one’s parasitic imagination the best one can. Whether through adulation like Baudelaire, reinvention like Corman or romantic adaptation like Stallone, those afflicted with Poepathy become like Roderick Usher, Prince Prospero or any of the nameless maniacal narrators in Poe’s work: obsessed, neurotic and fervently passionate about beauty and deformity. This illness strengthens the imagination rather than weakens, a disease that enhances the world with the exaggerated blush of a consumptive and brings out the poetic verisimilitude within. It’s without that’s ambiguous. 
