Poe: Introduction and "Ligeia"

Poe as first modern short story writer?  Irving, Hoffman, Hawthorne

Poe helps establish the parameters of the short story

Also help popularize the �unreliable narrator� tradition�in which the audience is �tricked� into identifying with a mad man?  Why would we want to read a story from a disturbed mind? 

Narrator�fictional creation within a story to act as the voice or homunculus of the author (just like alchemist Faust creating �mini-me� below)�the �voice� of the author

      AUTHOR                    narrator

Unreliable narrator�the author has deliberately subverted the mimetic tradition of narrator representing the author�we expect some level of objectivity, rationality, morality from the narrator/author

We expect the author (through the narrator) to tell us the truth (in some kind of objectively provable form)

Unreliable narrator�you can�t trust what they�re saying, their �take� on reality, their motive for telling the story

Motive of �Shipwrecked Sailor� narrator�to teach a moral lesson�the traditional motive of storyteller/narrator is to delight and instruct

Anyone had a �face the serpent� episode? A moment of truth?

Motive of an unreliable narrator�why are the narrators of �Ligeia� and �The Tell-Tale Heart� telling their stories?

You can�t trust that an unreliable narrator is giving a full, true, objective account and you can�t trust him/her motive for telling the story

Unreliable narrator feels compulsion to narrate�his/her subjective experience outweighs the mimetic tradition of recreating a fictional representation of an objective reality; motive may be psychotic, guilt

�Ligeia�

The Will: the ultimate driving force behind the engine of our consciousness and actions

How does narrative violate expectations from the get-go?  First-person speaker (admitting that he doesn�t know certain things, this �I� seems unreal, disconnected from reality, unknown and unnamed)�begin with uncertainty/doubt

Description of Ligeia:

�       incomprehensible lightness and elasticity footfall

�       She came and departed as a shadow

�       my closed study

�       dear music of her low sweet voice

�       marble hand upon my shoulder

�       In beauty of face no maiden ever equalled her

�       the radiance of an opium-dream

�       an airy and spirit-lifting vision

�       daughters of Delos (classical Greek island for worship and omens)

�       features not of that regular mould

�       heathen

narrator worships her, she�s fantasy-like, self-appointed god, shadowy, unreal, figment of his imagination, obsession, drug-dream

face of Ligeia (strange, but can�t say how) and then the eyes

why does the narrator focus on the eyes? Window of the soul�eyes as symbol of the incommensurable, the incomprehensible, the ineffable (what cannot be put into words)

romantic paradox�trying to write about what cannot be written about (show the limits of language itself, as representation, as mimesis�symbols may work better than words themselves)

the ineffable�the divine often seen as ineffable (beyond the power of words to define or limit)  because language is a human construction, it has limits of the human in terms of being able to comprehend, describe, understand

Ligeia is transcendentalist: American romantic movement which borrowed from Eastern religion ideas about transcending physical body into a spiritual state (reincarnation�soul existing outside the body) Emerson (�The Over-Soul��the world soul that each living being is part and particle of); Thoreau;

In her dying moment Ligeia loses transcendentalist faith for a darker nihilistic vision (Conquerer Worm) (Dark Romanticism)

�I loathed her with a hatred belonging more to demon than to man. My memory flew back, (oh, with what intensity of regret!) to Ligeia, the beloved, the august, the beautiful, the entombed.�

Narrator is obsessed with her, but also possesses her �entombed.� He possesses her more in death than life.

Lady Rowena, light-haired, blue-eyed, drinks wine

�It was then that I became distinctly aware of a gentle footfall upon the carpet, and near the couch; and in a second thereafter, as Rowena was in the act of raising the wine to her lips, I saw, or may have dreamed that I saw, fall within the goblet, as if from some invisible spring in the atmosphere of the room, three or four large drops of a brilliant and ruby colored fluid. If this I saw --not so Rowena.�

Unreliability?  Did this happen?  What do the drops do?  Kill Rowena?  Allow her (Rowena/Ligeia) to be reborn?  Narrator doesn�t explain

RULE OF SHORT STORY�WHAT YOU LEAVE OUT AS IMPORTANT AS WHAT YOU LEAVE IN.