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@ppoli611674629039 · 22 Nov 2020

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Another Edgar Allan Poe

#poe #humor

From adolescence to the grave, Poe lived a tormented existence - visited by ghosts of disappointed hopes, haunted by death in love, by stupidity, by the almost madness of many of his gestures, by the vain expectation of success, security and happiness. In an indifferent world that valued money more than poetry, he found solace only in the annihilation of himself.

This is how Philip Lindsay defines Edgar Allan Poe in his biography of the American writer. From his description emerges the portrait of a sad and hallucinated man, perpetually dismayed, unable to flashes of joy. This is, in fact, the image that springs from Poe's most famous horror stories - the almost autobiographical William Wilson, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum etc.

In fact, alongside these famous tales of terror, in which the atmosphere is actually tense and hallucinated, less well-known stories coexist, which can be defined without hesitation as humorous. We will examine six of them - The Man who was Used up, The Spectacles, Le Duc de L'Omelette, Bon Bon, X-ing a Paragraph and Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences - trying to extrapolate the main characteristics of humor from them.

Poe was also interested in humor from a critical point of view. In 1836 he reviewed Longstreet's Georgia Scenes for the Southern Literary Messenger.

Seldom in our lives have we laughed as immoderately over any book as over the one now before us.

Poe is capable of laughing, and also of making people laugh, proof of this that the Georgia Scenes review is not only an essay on humor, but it is also a humorous essay. To extol Longstreet's culture, Poe states that he is


learned in all things appertaining to the biped without feathers.

Poe greatly appreciates Longstreet's humor, especially for its realism, for the author's ability to reproduce genuine sketches of Southern life. However, it is immediately obvious that Poe's interest lies above all in some of Longstreet's tales, which he particularly enjoys reporting. One of these contains a skit in which a traveler unwittingly attends the rehearsals of a play, believing it to be the truth. He therefore runs to the rescue of a wretch from whom criminals would have plucked an eye. Another skit that Poe likes is that of a school teacher who was savagely beaten by his pupils who were not granted the Easter holidays. Yet another is the reproduction of a popular game in the Southwest, during which a poor duck is subjected to excruciating torture until one of the players manages to cut off its head. Poe calls such actions "barbaric" but the reader certainly feels how amusing they actually are to him.

The doubt therefore arises that Poe's humor is particular, based on sadism and bizarre. Returning to Lindsay's definition, we should correct it in this sense: Poe was a strange, hallucinated man, who, however, knew how to laugh, at least a sinister and mocking laugh.

Let us consider

two stories by Poe contained in Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque: The Man who was used up and The Spectacles.

Cunliffe, in his History of American Literature, considers these two stories "painful and even horrible". Indeed, the story of the soldier who appears handsome only thanks to technical discoveries, but, in reality, is so mutilated as to seem "a big and very funny package", and that of the short-sighted who falls in love with a woman who turns out to be his great-grandmother, they are not great literary proofs, they have none of the compactness, tension and poetry of major tales, but are nevertheless interesting as documents for a study of Poe's humor. Cunliffe himself, speaking of Poe's humorous stories, admits that

is their negative qualities that make them interesting. Strident, strained, grotesque, even macabre, they reveal the author's passion for cryptograms and artifice.

1. The Man who was Used up

The Man who was Used up subtitled A Tale of the late Bungaboo and Kickapoo Campaign. With this subtitle, Poe may have played on the 1840 presidential election slogan "Typpcanoe and Tyler Too", with which General Harrison's victory over Tecumseh at Typpcanoe (1811) was celebrated by the Whigs in a program of revival of the sentiment of national unity. The subtitle, therefore, indicates the presence of even a slight political satire within Poe's humor.

According to David Galloway, the satire implicit in the tale tends above all to ridicule the blind faith in the technological progress of contemporary America, through the image of General Smith horribly mutilated by the Indians and "reconstructed", piece by piece, by technology, even in the vocal organs. However, beyond the satire, what interests Poe most in this tale is precisely the one that is least appealing to critics, namely the horrifying situation of mutilation (compare the dramatization skit in the Georgia Scenes).

The comedy of the story arises immediately from the contrast between the first impression that the narrator has of the general and the last. Before learning of the mutilations, the narrator unknowingly admires this man so perfectly reconstructed that he appears splendid and imposing. In the description he makes of the general, as he sees him for the first time, the hyperbolic language leads to a comedy that will sharpen "retrospectively" at the end of the story, when the trick is revealed.

The hyperbolic description of the general's perfection is an example of the character's comic.


General Smith's sideburns

were the handsomest pair of whiskers under the sun

His mouth was

utterly unequalled

His teeth were

the most entirely even, and the most brilliantly white of all conceivable teeth.

Each of his eyes was worth two of those of normal people. The description of the general, comic in itself, by virtue of the comic of exaggeration, becomes even hilarious in contrast to the other hyperbolic description, the final one.

There was a large and exceedingly odd looking bundle of something which lay close by my feet.

Adjectives such as "unequaled", in fact, will take on a very particular meaning when it is discovered that many of the general's organs are "unparalleled" because they are fake and therefore not found in common reality. A similar comic light will acquire the description of the general's rigid movements. Its "rectangular precision", first interpreted as dignity and composure of gestures, will then be produced by the movement of mechanical gears and therefore "rectangular" in the true sense of the word!

Another comic description is that of the attitude of Mr Sinivate who, during the conversation

thought proper to put his finger on the side of his nose.

In addition to the gesture itself being comic, the notation "thought proper" is comic as it is unthinkable that a spontaneous gesture, a vice, is done voluntarily.

The name of the general “Brevet Brigadier General John A.B.C. Smith ” is a source of comedy. The general is never called simply "General Smith" but always with all his appellations and forenames. The repetition of a long name has always been comical, it is more so here when we realize that to be called by all those names is nothing but a grotesque bundle without limbs, from the moment of discovery, in fact, the narrator will begin to call it simply "the thing".

The comic of names is present throughout the story in its various aspects. We have already mentioned the comic repetition of long and pompous appellations. Another example is that comical situation that we could call "the misunderstood name". General Smith, in fact, absurdly continues to call the narrator "Mr Thompson", a name that is not his. The other characters of the story then all have, some more or less, particular names, some with a funny sound like "Reverend Doctor Drummummup" and "Chiponchipino, the sculptor", others allusive like "Mrs Pirouette" referring to a woman who is dancing.

The structure of The Man who was Used up is comical, as the same series of inconclusive questions and answers are repeated several times, and with the same words, every time the narrator questions someone about General Smith.

The research carried out by the narrator on the general gives rise to a series of comic skits; particularly funny is the one that takes place in the church during the sermon, a typical scene, among other things, of much of American humor (see Tom Sawyer in church with the bug). The narrator finds himself having to sit "in all the martyrdom of dignified silence" while he wants to talk to his neighbor.

A fairly refined comic technique, used by Poe in this story, is the reprise of a word in different contexts. Also in the church scene, the narrator is talking to the neighbor who is about to satisfy the man's curiosity. She states that the general "is the man ..." but the preacher interrupts her

… Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, he cometh up and is cut down like a flower.

The interruption frustrates the narrator's wait, the repetition of the word "man" in two different contexts creates a comic echo, then the parody of the language of the sermons is evident.

During one of his usual attempts to obtain information about the general, the narrator is interrupted for the umpteenth time in his conversation by Mrs O'Trump by someone who believes he is talking not about Smith but about a certain Captain Mann:

… Are you talking about captain Mann and the duel? Oh I must hear - do tell - go on, Mrs O ’Trump! - do now go on! And go on Mrs O ’Trump did - all about a certain captain Mann who was either shot or hung or should have been both shot and hung. Yes! Mrs O ’Trump, she went on, and I - I went off.

In this passage there are two other examples of a comic of speech. The first is given by the repetition of the word "go on" which serves to emphasize the fact that Mrs O 'Trump stops talking to the narrator to hold an interminable conversation with another person on a topic of no interest. The other example is given by the pun based on the different meaning that the verb "to go" assumes by changing its preposition from "on" to "off": from "continue" to "go out, go".