Powerful nonsense: Edgar Allan Poe, late twentieth-century fiction, and the ideology of criticism
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Abstract
My project revisits the philosophical and literary problem of seeing irony as an exclusively negative force via the works of Edgar Allan Poe and four moments in Poe’s global twentieth-century afterlife. As argued in the nineteenth century by Hegel and Kierkegaard and in the twentieth by David Foster Wallace, irony can tear down any belief it exposes as bunk, but can never offer an authentic, affirmative alternative to take that belief’s place. I begin, by way of Friedrich Schlegel and Thomas Pynchon, by showing that this infinite negativity primarily revolves around the reader’s own undecidability about authorial intent in both Romantic and Postmodern literature, an undecidability designed to keep the reader’s eye trained on what the author believes and off the reader’s own beliefs.
In contrast, Poe’s works are both so masterfully clever and so insufferably amateurish that the centrifugal force of their irony casts off Poe altogether, at which point the reader’s own preexisting beliefs about the matter at hand—whether it be aesthetics, race, or sexuality—take over and shape the reader’s interpretation of the work to the exclusion of all contradictory evidence. I call this centrifugal force powerful nonsense; nonsense because it represents the reader’s encounter with contradictory propositions (in the case of Poe, that he both knew and did not know what he was doing), and powerful because it generates an affirmative ideological commitment from the reader by strengthening a preexisting belief into an article of faith.
In the subsequent chapters I document Poe’s influence on Vladimir Nabokov, Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, and Angela Carter to argue that each learned a similar lesson from Poe on how to push the reader past the point of comprehensible authorial intent to the place where one must resist the text’s cruel or incomprehensible irony with one’s own beliefs. Nabokov and Morrison are each both more vicious and more humane than we can tolerate; Murakami impossibly has his finger so firmly on the pulse of late capitalism and cares so little about it; Carter, from mid-career on, makes sexuality as much a problem as a non-problem.
I show that critics habitually take the bait from these authors, producing ideologically driven readings that never quite square with the text in their attempts to imagine a more caring and equitable world. Throughout, and especially in the conclusion, I sync up these liberal imaginings with the broader, centuries-long liberalism of theories of the novel from Schlegel on, and wonder why and how much we should care about the textual imprecision of such imaginings when they are undertaken for noble ends.
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Attribution 4.0 International