Space and Symbol in the Tales of Edgar Allan

Poe
Gerhard Hoffmann
Institut fur Englische Philologie
Universitat Wurzburg
Translated by Elizabeth G. Lord
Washington State University
Editorial Note
This essay is the fourth in a series of translations sampling contemporary European
responses to Poe [see Poe Studies, 9 (1976), 1-6, 33-39; 10 ( 1977), 1-12] and the first
in a sequence of articles representing modern German criticism of the author, for
which Roger Forclaz Poe in Europe: Recent German Criticism in Poe Studies, 11
(1978), 49-55, provides a general introduction. Gerhard Hoffmann is Professor of
English and American literature at the University of Wurzburg, West Germany. His
numerous publications cover a range from Shakespeare to the most recent trends in
American literature and culture, with emphasis on analysis of basic patterns in
literature space, time, character, and action. He is editor of a series on German
research in American Studies and has published several collections of articles on
important American works and authors. Hoffmanns most recent book, Raum,
Situation, erzahlte Wirklichkeit: Poetologische und Historische Studien zum
englischen und amerikanischen Roman [Space, Situation, Narrated Reality:
Poetological and Historical Studies in the English and American Novel] has just been
published. Currently he is working on projects dealing with ONeill, the American
novel to 1930, and postmodern American literature. Raum und Symbol in den
Kurzgeschichten Edgar Allan Poes originally appeared in Jahrbuch fur
Amerikastudien, 16 (1971), 102-127. The translation is published by permission of the
author and Amerikanstudien/American Studies.
Abstract
This article confines itself to E. A. Poes use of setting as spatial symbol and as a
medium for conveying atmosphere in his tales. Close analyses of The Fall of the
House of Usher and The Masque of the Red Death reveal that setting, with Poe, is
an expressive atmospheric unity that rigorously excludes any isolation of an object as
a symbol unrelated to the whole. This atmospheric unity is achieved through a unique
correlation between observer and setting and/or participant in the story and the
environment with which he interacts. Objectively seen, the technical means for
establishing this correlation are these: the stylization and circumscription [column
2:] of space, and the arrangement of individual details within patterns of orientation
such as east-west, above-below, outside-inside, and so forth. Subjectively seen, the
fusion of vivid illustrative details, the emotional response of the spectator-narrator,
and the mental process of reflection are of chief importance. Considered as a part of
the symbolic pattern of the tale, the spatial symbol is based upon the atmospheric
unity of a room, house, and/or landscape with the spectator or participant. Different
kinds of space symbols may be distinguished on the spectrum between associative
symbol at the one extreme and rational allegory at the other; these are designated as
the open and the closed symbol, the latter approaching allegory but maintaining its
symbolic structure by means of its manifold relationships with an epic [i.e., narrative]
context. In addition, a milieu symbol may be differentiated from an analogical
symbol, the former purveying the influence on the epic [narrative] character of the
ideas and powers present in his environment, the latter embodying analogies between
spirit and matter, character and setting. The use that Poe makes of the expressive
ambiguity of the spatial pattern is indicative of an artistic design that aims at a mixture
of different spheres of reality and approximates modern technique, even if the
blending of the subjective and the objective is not as yet achieved by employing a
montage of particles of reality but through the atmosphere of the expressive setting as
such. (GH)

I
In a narrative work it is by no means a matter of course that concrete space, in which
events take place, characters act, and objects are located, is evoked in the readers
mind in more than the most general of terms. For example, Richardsons, Fieldings,
Smolletts, and Sternes works, in short almost all classical English novels of the
eighteenth century, merely name or designate their settings except for some nature
scenery without conveying connected visual data or evoking values of expression,
let alone involving space or object as fellow actors. The discovery of aesthetic space
as narrative component with variable atmospheric values, such as the uncanny or the
idyllic, and with this discovery the clear delineation of such space in a work of art,
were first achieved by the English Gothic novel. To be sure, in The Castle of
Otranto, Walpole for the most part still sketches mere locales for action with a
labyrinthine system of directions. Ann Radcliffe then develops a description that
vividly calls space to mind, a space conveying an uncanny as well as an idyllic mood,
and brings these to a first high point, for instance in her famous novel The Mysteries
of Udolpho. After that, the use of the atmospheric qualities of space, as done here,
takes on great importance, for example in the works of Dickens and Poe. The
symbolic aspects of space and objects are also present here and there in the Gothic
novel, for instance in the description of the subterranean caves [page 2:] which evoke
images of hell in Lewis The Monk, or the subterranean regions of flight far from
divine grace in Maturins Melmoth the Wanderer. With the exception of Dickens,
however, the symbolic or allegorical presentation employing space and objects does
not actually develop until the nineteenth-century American novel and short story.
Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville must be mentioned here especially.
In terms of intellectual history, these authors interest in this symbolic or allegorical
manner of presentation can be explained in terms of the common Christian heritage
modified by the special spiritual conditions in New England and emerging in the
domain of the arts as a preeminence of spirit over matter: no art that sprang from
American roots in this period could fail to show the marks of abstraction (1). About
the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the religious root of symbolic thought,
which originally grew out of the assumption of a divine order and expressed itself in
analogies between the realms of the physical, moral, and spiritual, can be detected
only in part (2). The process of secularization manifests itself in that stress is no
longer placed on analogies between God and nature, but instead on those between
nature and man (3). Natural objects come to reflect psychic processes and moral
problems, while religious-philosophical rationales are no longer given. At the same
time, the analogy between inside and outside is also applied to the work of man
house and man-made objects which now can directly reflect his countenance and
his soul.
Given these spiritual conditions, the spatial environment of man increases in
significance; this explains in part the effect of the Gothic novel, where spatial and
psychic elements in the reaction of man to the atmospheric qualities of space
become connected, though as yet in a relatively superficial way. To be sure, the motifs
and means of presentation found in the European Gothic novel as well as tales of
horror and darkness are modified individually by the American narrators and are
adapted to the psychic or moral theme of a given work. Poes terror, which he
creates by specifically making use of mans relationship to space, is in his own words
not of Germany, but of the soul (4); in The Old Apple Dealer, Hawthorne
identifies with the lover of the moral picturesque (5). Thus American narrative art
has modified mood-invested space* by enriching it with psychological and moral
factors, causing it to assume symbolic character. That the stereotyped spatial motifs of
the Gothic novel and story were in part retained in spite of quite different goals
by the authors mentioned earlier may be explained by the fact that the narrator is now
working with personal symbols, which only develop their meaning from the literary
context and thus from the associations [column 2:] of the reader. Within the mood-
invested nature scene, within the setting featuring the ruin, subterranean passages,
labyrinths and corridors, and within the pattern of orientations above and below,
outside and inside, these authors developed a firm topography and a system of place
relationships, which by means of certain constants of expression facilitated the
creation of atmospheric and symbolic form in the individual work.
All this is especially true of Poe, who proceeds from the delineation of space in the
Gothic novel or story to develop narrative spaces in which physical elements combine
with psychic ones in the sense of a genuine mutual relationship between space and
dweller, or space and observer. Inner conflicts are transferred to spaces and objects,
become embodied within them; at the same time, these conflicts in turn are
determined by these spaces. Poes special achievement is that he endows a horror-
invested space with its own traits divorced from pragmatic reality; he achieves this by
combining real and phantasmic elements in an expressive entity with symbolic
significance, thus preparing the way for the modern narrative literature of a James,
Kafka, or Faulkner (6). The basic problem when delineating this kind of space arises
from combining within space vividness, mood-investment, and referential quality.
Poes solution to this problem will be analyzed here by interpreting examples from
The Fall of the House of Usher and The Masque of the Red Death. To this end, it
will be necessary to distinguish in terminology and in fact between 1) a mood-
invested space, which arises from the relationship of object and subject, expressive
thing and mood-invested persons, forming a closed unit of expression, and 2)
symbolic space, the referential qualities of which grow out of the expressive unity of
the mood-invested space.

II
In view of the significance of space in Poes work, or of the complexity and
suggestiveness (XIV, 207) (7) which he demands and again and again realizes in his
stories, it seems appropriate and desirable to seek their meaning by analyzing his
presentation of space and concrete object. To be sure, such a procedure harbors the
twofold danger that 1) the symbolic content of an individual story may be
overemphasized and other aspects, for example the element of horror, and thus the
mood-investment of space, may be neglected (8); and that 2) the expressive wholeness
of the mood-invested space may be overlooked and the concrete objects seen in
isolation as signs pointing beyond themselves in the allegorical sense. Wilbur, for
example, states that . . . [Poes] stories are allegorical not only in their broad patterns,
but also in their smallest details (9). Arguments against this view of Poes stories are,
for one, that they can be read at different levels and therefore the allegorical
interpretations claim to absoluteness is not fulfilled, and, for another, that although
the stories as a whole seem to have referential character, the individual detail in large
part eludes unambiguous symbolic interpretation (10). Proceeding from this fact, A.
Stasts in his informative work on Edgar Allan Poes symbolistische Erzahlksunst seeks
to explain the symbolic character of the [page 3:] short stories by means of the
psychology of reader response. According to this concept, however, the readers
imagination, adjusting to the perspective of the first-person narrator, succeeds only at
the end of the story in overcoming in a dramatic process the allegorical variant of the
metaphor in favor of the symbolic one (11). Although it is correct that the
constituting of a symbol demands a psychic process in the sense of empathy, since the
symbol, in contrast to allegory, must be grasped intuitively and experientially if it is to
yield up its inherent meaning, it is not true that this psychic process occurs only at the
conclusion of the story. On the contrary, from the very beginning Poe uses the tone
as well as the diversity of analogical resemblance (XI, 63) in order to exclude the
allegorical variant of the metaphor. Besides, the symbolic character of the tales is
independent of the use of a first-person narrator, as is apparent, for instance, in The
Masque, which has a third person narrator. The very elements which the symbolic
structures and means of presentation in The Fall of the House of Usher (first-person
narrator) and The Masque of the Red Death (third-person narrator) have in common
indicate that it is not the figure of the narrator which is decisive; rather it is the
delineation of space, by means of which, with mood-invested space as starting point,
the symbolic quality of the narrative is constituted. This will be illustrated and
discussed below in greater detail for the two tales just mentioned, with a few
additional comparative remarks about the detective stories and the landscape sketches
The Domain of Arnheim and Landors Cottage.

III
The Fall of the House of Usher suggests itself as the subject of the following
investigation, for it is a typical Poe short story in which the most important
characteristic of his tales, the combination of extreme intellectual and spiritual
conditions with a suggestively mood-invested space, is especially clear and
pronounced. In his late work Eureka, Poe set down the theory of his cosmological
concept of the unity of a universe (12) which involves no qualitative distinction
between animate and inanimate, for these concepts are there translated into a narrative
context by correlating man and space and are rendered dynamic by the course of time.
Thinking in terms of correlations and analogies is the intellectual prerequisite for this
process. The most important artistic means for the translation of these thought patterns
into a symbolic context is the tone, as Poe himself called it, which regulates the
psychic proximity or distance between the narrator and the event. In so doing, it also
connects subjective and objective (factual-concrete) components of the delineation of
the mood-invested space and, aside from the incidents, plays the most important
part in structuring the effective unity of the tales (13). Thus the tone, considered
with the readers psychology in mind, also has a synthesizing effect; it affects
simultaneously the intellect (reason), the heart (passion), and the soul, and creates
in the tales of effect that vividness which in Poes terminology is the result of a
detailed rendering of emotional reactions and observational dare. The tone helps to
create the impression, [column 2:] so important for Poe, of verisimilitude, the
probability of the events, making it possible for the reader to adapt to the narrative
perspective and thus to experience from a distance which is variable internally as well
as externally.
The delineation of space occurs as a process, conveyed for instance through the first-
person narrator; indeed, in the tales of terror it is constituted first of all as mood-
invested space (14), which is experienced through the mutual relationship of space
and observer, a space with the atmospheric qualities of the unexpected, the
inexplicable, the uncanny. It is of no concern here who experiences a given space as
mood-invested the narrator or narrative figure or whether the subject remains
the same or changes. Nor is the perspective distance decisive, which is the means of
varying the spatial distance of the observer, that is of increasing or decreasing it.
Whenever an experience is brought into focus from the subjects side mood-invested
space is involved, whether viewed from a distance or close up. From this very change
of close and distant perspective with the impact on the observer remaining constant,
Poe derives one of his most important effects for building an uncanny atmosphere. On
the objective side, form, color, magnitude, and situation of concrete objects are
expressive by nature: they cause things to appear strange or normal, threatening or
familiar, uncanny or idyllic. Tones and sounds, light and shadow brightness and
darkness are additional phenomena which create atmosphere. Directions also are
significant in so far as they possess mood qualities. For example, Poe likes to employ
the contrasts outside and inside, above and below, at climactic points of his
stories. Other means for delineating space are the presence of certain living beings or
people and the reaction of the mood-invested subject, perhaps his expressive gestures
and movements; as mute motion these may replace the mood-creating empathy of a
narrator with whom the reader would otherwise identify.
For the delineation of such a mood-invested space Poe develops a pattern, which
possesses validity not only for the tales of terror but also for his detective stories and
landscape sketches. This pattern represents a characteristic and profound change from
space as delineated in the Gothic novel, where a certain aspect always created a
predictable impression (in the sense of sublime perhaps or picturesque). Poe
transforms this rather mechanical relationship into an individual one, usually
irrational. The reaction to an impression made by space in Poes stories cannot be
predicted; mere observation often changes immediately into mood-investment, or the
inexplicable phenomenon of mood-investment again provokes the attempt merely to
observe, thus giving rise to a psychologically well founded sequence of mood-
investment, observation mood-investment, and so forth, which is strengthened even
more by reflection. In this way, observation and mood investment are brought into a
dynamic, tense relationship, a relationship that forms the basis for the experience of
the uncanny. The beginning of The House of Usher offers an example:
During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when
the clouds hung oppressively low in [page 4:] the heavens, I had been passing alone,
on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself,
as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.
I know not how it was but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of
insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was
unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the
mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I
looked upon the scene before me upon the mere house, and the simple landscape
features of the domain upon the bleak walls upon the vacant eye-like windows
upon a few rank sedges and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees with
an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly
than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium the bitter lapse into everyday
life the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a
sickening of the heart an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of
the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it I paused to
think what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?
It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that
crowded upon me as I pondered. (III, 273f.)
Characteristic in the already mentioned sense of the unpredictability, either as to kind
or intensity, of an impression is the fact that to some extent relatively normal objects,
the expressive value of which the observer seeks to fathom by means of singling them
out, but which he must experience as equally mood-invested and therefore as being an
atmospheric unit, call forth an uncommonly strong reaction: the mere house,
the simple landscape feature, a few rank sedges, a few white trunks. In various
ways, the inexplicability of the emotion is emphasized, by which the narrator feels
overpowered: for one thing by the direct indication I know not how it was, for
another indirectly by the tense change of preterite to present, which stresses especially
the extent to which feelings are confused, the confusion persisting with undiminished
vehemence in spite of the distance in time between experience and report. It is
furthermore significant that the emotional reactions evoked by the sight of the house
are of a complex, difficult nature, deviant from the norm, and are felt to be such by the
narrator. This fact explains at the same time his efforts to analyze his internal
processes; this analysis gives to the entire presentation its characteristic form, namely
the permeation in turn of observation, mood-investment, and reflection. Accordingly,
the narrator begins by describing the impression made on him by the house, even
before telling of details in its appearance. Visual details are given in a fragmentary
fashion, in a way that does not permit combining them into a picture of the whole;
they are not given until several lines farther down, and then as a mere insertion into a
sentence which seeks to determine more closely the condition of utter depression of
soul at the sight of the house. Furthermore, their selection indicates that they are
intended to evoke atmospheric qualities without which the impression of uncanniness
on the viewer, (and the reader) would be utterly unthinkable: bleak, vacant, eye-
like, rank, white, decayed. The argumentative ( in part anaphoric) stringing
together of individual words and phrases, a means of creating sound values, as well as
the ever more pronounced reflective element, serve to intensify expression and
prepare the readers awareness that, for the time being, description is coming to an
end, which end directly expresses the impossibility of dealing intellectually with the
experience: nor could I grapple with [column 2:] the shadowy fancies that crowded
upon me as I pondered. What enables the narrator here to share the knowledge of
the author (15), even though in a limited way, and to pass it on to the reader indirectly,
is intuition, which is so important for Poe and which connects the various forces of
the soul and mind (16).
If focusing on intuitive experience (not on observation, which singles out objects and
their attributes) is the subjective component of delineating a mood-invested space,
then one of its objective prerequisites is wholeness or circumscription in respect to
settings otherwise without mood-investment or invested in different ways. For this
reason, Poe prefers remote buildings as the scene of his stories; where the
surroundings are included in the description, they mostly have the same uncanny or
fairytale characteristics as the house itself (17). In the excerpt quoted above, for
example, the narrator speaks of a singularly dreary tract of country,
characteristically emphasizing the impression of somberness by means of a situational
element: the evening shadows, which render indistinct the contours of all objects and
therefore their singularity; the low ceiling of clouds, which has a burdensome effect
and emphasizes that space is hemmed in and constitutes a unit of expression. In
his Philosophy of Composition, Poe gives as reason for his approach that a close
circumscription of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident:
it has the force of a frame to a picture (XIV, 204). By following this method, he
achieves an intensification and dramarization of interpersonal relationships or the
relationship between man and the organic or inorganic world surrounding him.
Delineating a mood-invested space in successive stages is not restricted to the
sequence and integration of observed details, emotional reaction, and ideational
analysis, but includes also the narrators repeated attempts to escape a mood by
changing his focus for external reasons. Mood-invested space builds up because of the
very fact that the narrator seeks in vain to break up the unity of the mood-invested
space into the sum of the isolated details of the observed setting by changing his
position, that is to say by approaching in space and thus making closer examination
possible. The observers resistance and the intensity of experiencing space are artfully
correlated here by Poe:
I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt,
there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus
affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our
depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars
of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to
annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression, and, acting upon this idea, I reined
my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre
by the dwelling, and gazed down but with a shudder even more thrilling than
before upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly
tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows. (III, 274)
This passage is similarly informative about Poes procedure in preparing and giving
reasons for the constitution of symbols through mood-invested space; it shows how
the author prepares to transform rational-logical analogies between space and man
into symbols by means of duplicating sensual phenomena ( this duplication
corresponding here at the same time to an alienation), and [page 5:] how he
establishes this transformation within the mood-invested space. Since for the reader
language is the medium through which matters are presented by the observer-narrator,
Poe logically applies this method of duplicating to the language as well. The shades
of the evening thus point to the shadowy fancies in the narrators consciousness;
the feeling of insufferable gloom, which seizes him at the sight of the house,
conversely then finds a pendant in the air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom
(III, 278), which fills Rodericks study and again points to the one unceasing
radiation of gloom ( III, 282) emanating from Rodericks spirit. Verbal expression
(like the delineation of space) emphasizes also the alternating activity and radiation of
space and person, excluding one-sided causal dependence. Into this situationally
experienced expressive unit of space is embedded here at the start the first
metaphorically suggested analogy of man and space in the expression eye-like
windows; significantly, this formulation is then repeated at the end of the quoted
passage and in immediate connection with the description of the phenomena
duplicated in the lake; by their position at the end of the paragraph, these words take
on emphasis as well as a prophetic meaning.
In the course of the story the mood-invested space, that is, its unity of expression and
not its individual isolated details, comes to form the basis of the analogous
relationships between man and space. This strengthening of the parallelism of man
and space coincides with the intensification of the mood; that is to say the analogies
between man and space are bound atmospherically and in this process both appear
equally enigmatic: the house exhibits a wild inconsistency between its still perfect
adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones (III, 276),
and this wild inconsistency in the buildings structure corresponds to the
inconsistency in Rodericks behavior. A similar correspondence exists between the
beginning deterioration of his personality and the fine fissure in the masonry, which
runs from the roof to the tarn, while the resemblance of Rodericks hair to the minute
fungi uniformly covering the masonry finally involves even the realm of plants, thus
connecting in space the organic vegetative realm with the inorganic and, by
association, both with man. The procedure of planning space as an entity beginning
with the atmospheric is shown most effectively at the high point of the description,
when organic and inorganic, visible and hidden elements join in a vivid atmosphere
which surrounds house, trees, and lake and binds them into a unit. By means of its
associations and rhythms, language plays an essential part in preparing the analogous
relationship of man and space, while relationships between visible atmosphere and
ideas of illness and decay, heaven and hell are suggested:
. . . about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to
themselves and their immediate vicinity an atmosphere which had no affinity with
the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall,
and the silent tarn a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish hintly discernible
and leaden-hued. (III, 276)
For Poe the following formative principles of delineating a mood-invested space can
therefore be stated: 1) circumscription and wholeness of space, which do not admit of
singling out any object; 2) perceptibility to the senses of the magical-uncanny
elements of effect, which have become concrete in the spatial entity by a process of
rendering atmosphere visible; 3) duplication of phenomena, which prepares for the
constitution of symbols within the mood-invested space; 4) verbal suggestion by
means of tone, repetition of words, and metaphoric phrases, and finally 5)
dynamization of this delineation of space within the psychic and physical process.
These principles for forming mood-invested space encompass then, as emphasized
earlier, the conditions that make symbolic space possible (18). At the same time,
however, for Poe the formative principle is also relevant to content, because the
wholeness of the mood-invested space refers to the unity of the universe. For one
thing, mood-investment and wholeness of space are prerequisites for the actualization
of its symbolic qualities, for symbol is dependent on situation, as Tindall has already
pointed out (19). On the other hand, mood-investment and wholeness are to be
understood symbolically because they point to a fate which is the same for matter and
for spirit within the cycle of becoming and passing away, individuation and
dissolution. This is particular to Poe, and testifies to the unity of his cosmological and
poetic conception. Now in the attempt to define more closely the relationship of
mood-invested and symbolic space, differentiations necessarily result especially in
respect to kinds of symbols differentiations important for the analysis of Poes
tales as of all symbolic narrative literature.
In this connection it is necessary to remember also that the object as symbol like all
objects in the mood-invested space is a definite part of an expressive entity for the
very reason that it is experienced and can be experienced only as part of its
surroundings. This is to say, the referential character of the concrete symbol and of
space ( both belong inseparably together) is tied to a concrete inner as well as outer
situation and may change or be lost with a change in the spatial arrangement or in the
focus of the narrative figure or the narrator. To be sure, the symbolic value does not
depend on a certain person, for the mood-invested space has subjective as well as
intersubjective aspects. This then explains the fact that space and object can be
experienced differently, and that their referential character may be recognized or not.
Furthermore, this explains the fact that the symbolic value of a spatial phenomenon is
seen differently at different times or by different persons, and here lies the cause of
the ambivalence of the symbol which permits several interpretations, indeed provokes
them. The more intimately a symbolic object blends with its surroundings and is fused
with the context, the more it seems to be open to various interpretations. Conversely, a
relatively closed symbol results in the case of a static, rationally solvable system of
correspondences, a system approaching allegory, which maintains, however, its
symbolic structure by means of multiple references within the context. The use of
different kinds of symbols in one and the same story then has a definite purpose: with
the openness of certain symbols, for example, Poe knows how to counter the danger
that the obvious meaning . . . will be found to smother its insinuated one (XI, 111),
while the closed symbol [page 6:] (at times in connection with a poetic allusion)
causes hidden meanings to become apparent.
Besides this formal distinction between an open and a closed symbol according to the
degree of its dependence on mood-invested space and the narrative context, a second
differentiation is aimed at aspects of content, especially the relationship of man and
space. According to the nature of this relationship, it is possible to speak of a symbol
that determines causally, or a milieu symbol, and one that enlightens existentially, or
an analogical symbol (20). The milieu symbol generally represents a slice of reality,
which reveals the ideas and forces that determine man and his condition. But the
analogical symbol, in which appearance and meaning of an object are related in an
analogous manner, is directed to a greater extent towards the inner situation of the
narrative figures and toward interpersonal relationships. In the case of the milieu
symbol, in addition to mood-invested circumscription and wholeness, greater
importance belongs to factual values and observational qualities in the documentary
sense. Analogical symbolism on the other hand especially because of its function
of interpreting the inner being of man is characterized by being independent to a
great extent of ties to pragmatic reality and thus also by greater completeness, which
results from the freedom of choice and arrangement of details. The analogical symbol
naturally plays the more important part in Poes work because of the psychological
themes of his best stories, all the more because it not only serves to clarify human
existence but also encompasses an interpretation of cosmological conditions and thus
establishes a parallel between the fate of man and of matter. But Poe also elicits
special effects from the very contrast of milieu-oriented and analogical interpretation
of the symbol, as will become apparent. Within the framework of the wholeness of the
mood-invested space in The House of Usher, and by means of duplicating spatial
phenomena ( for instance as mirror image in the water), associative relationships are
now established which in the end take on symbolic significance. The same is true of
the concretely visible atmosphere, which as symbol of the unity of action of man and
space also acquires something like a dramatizing function in the final scene.
Verbal suggestion by means of the tone, which to a considerable extent brings about
the constitution of the mood-invested space, is for the reader also the medium which
evokes the under or mystic current of its meaning (III, 284) and thus endows the
mood-invested space with referential character, that is to say with its symbolic
function within the whole narrative. The suggestive element here arises from the mere
coloration of the language, that is to say from the factual, emotional, or ideational
presentation of the details, or from the metaphoric expression which establishes
connections (eye-like windows); in fact, it urges upon the reader always within
the framework of the mood-invested space the feeling of an analogical
resemblance which forms the foundation and expression of the symbolic space and
integrates the mood-invested and the symbolic space. The tone can fulfill this
integrating function, because for one thing it arouses the feeling of the unexpected,
often of the uncanny, and for another it reveals to the sensitive reader the referential
character of space. The strong ideational elements, that could at first be interpreted as
a psychic reaction to the experience of space, here acquire yet another function: by
stimulating the readers reflection and imagination in addition to his feeling, they
prepare for the intuitive recognition of the atmospheres symbolic values of
expression, that is, they help to turn the mood-invested space into one that is at the
same time symbolic, without losing atmospheric qualities (of the uncanny or the
horrible). The narrator may be conscious or not of the analogical relationship among
objective phenomena, or between object and man; the attentive reader, however, is
able to grasp the relationships intuitively, indeed is helped substantially by the tone
which expresses the knowledge of the author.
How important ideational elements are for the constitution of symbolic space, or for
the clarification of the referential qualities of mood-invested space in Poes work, may
be seen by yet another characteristic of his tales, that is by the insertion of
cosmological ideas and poetological remarks (through narrator or protagonist) which
correlate to the delineation of space and interpret it. These reflections in their graded
sequence reveal a formative principle similar to the delineation of mood-invested
space itself, which causes the narrator to fail again and again in his attempts to shift
the focus from mood to observation. Thus Rodericks and the narrators repeated
attempts to explain the mysterious phenomena serve but to confirm their irrational,
inexplicable aspects. This holds true for the narrators reflections which are of a
rational and milieu-oriented nature and concern the determining influence of the
house on the inhabitant or the duration of its influence over generations, and by means
of which he seeks in vain to clarify the strange analogical relationship; even more so
this holds true for Rodericks views concerning the spiritual influence of the house,
not the least reason being the emotionally colored manner of expression and the
concept of mood-invested space as a unit of expression. For instance, Roderick is
conscious of an influence which some peculiarities in the mere form and substance
of his family mansion, had, by dint of long sufferance . . . obtained over his spirit
an 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 (III, 281). The connection between the material and the spiritual is
presupposed here; later on, Rodericks theory about objects being able to feel, about
their sentience, is given as reason. At the same time, Roderick refers here without
being explicit to the formative principle of mood-invested space, namely its
wholeness of expression. His theory, quoted below, contains therefore not only
cosmological but also poetological elements, including in particular the principles
mentioned in the above discussion of the delineation of space, that is, the principles of
wholeness, sensualization, duplication, verbal suggestion, and dynamization in
connection with the element of time:
The conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of
collocation of these stones in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of
the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around
above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its
reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. Its evidence [page 7:] the evidence of
the sentience was to be seen, he said (and I here started as he spoke,) in the gradual
yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls.
(III, 286)
The tendency towards increasing clarification in description as well as in reflection
can be observed also in regard to the symbolic quality of space: as the action
progresses, the open symbol is supplemented by the closed. To this corresponds the
integration into the story, approximately at midpoint, of the ballad about the Haunted
Palace, its referential quality being expressly emphasized by the narrators poetic
allusion to the under or mystic current of its meaning. Elsewhere, Poes remark
concerning interpretation is just as plain: for by the Haunted Palace I mean to imply
a mind haunted by phantoms a disordered brain (21). Accordingly, the palace
itself, the seat of the monarch Thought (III, 284), may be understood to mean
Rodericks head, the yellow banners on the roof his long silken hair; the two
luminous windows are his eyes, which are described as large, liquid and luminous
(III, 278), while the palace door (with pearl and ruby glowing), from which is heard
the praise of truth, evidently is supposed to represent his mouth with lips and teeth.
This construction, however, takes on thematic relevance in the sense of the story only
with the events inside the palace, events which may be designated generally as
dissolution of order: But evil things, in robes of sorrow / Assailed the monarchs
high estate (III, 285). The function of this poem dubious in its artistic or rather
lyrical quality (22) within the narrative as a whole is not limited to the clarification
of the psychic processes in a disordered brain that Poe stressed; that is, it represents
more than an allegory which can be analyzed rationally and more than a mere bit of
stage business. Being Roderick Ushers creation, it is, with its phantasmic quality, a
manifestation of mental disturbance; because of its referential character it is also a
sign of the sensitivity and clairvoyance of its author and of his truly amazing intuitive
insight into his inner situation. Moreover, this ballad expresses Poes cosmological
ideas in regard to the relationship of matter and spirit; it forms, so to speak, a
connecting link between Rodericks theoretical discourse on the sentience of objects
which characteristically follows the ballads rendition and the relationships
outlined in the delineation of space, the relationships between matter and organic life,
space and man. This means that the ballad of the Haunted Palace is one of Poes
signals to the reader which direct his attention to the referential quality of the spatial
environment without the need for the symbolic components becoming too explicit
within the space delineation itself. This in turn means that the space presented in The
House of Usher remains an open symbol, with manifold references not interpreted in
detail (23). How important this is for the successful conclusion of the narrative as a
tale of terror, and thus for the preservation and augmentation of the elements of the
uncanny, then becomes apparent in the rest of the tale.
This continuation of the story is characterized by the fact that the tendency to clarify,
which had increased more and more to about the middle of the narrative, now
gradually recedes, with the result that the actual moment of action again unfolds more
vigorously and references which [column 2:] were all too plain are dissolved. This is
brought about 1) with the help of analogies which become increasingly more subtle
and decrease in their accessibility to logical-rational insight as the story approaches
more and more closely the climax of action and emotion, that is, the reappearance of
Madeline; and 2) through the intensification of the atmospheric element in the
delineation of the mood-invested space this intensification, however, does not
detract from its power to refer by association.
Even before the final scene, Poe begins the reduction of rationally intelligible
relationships, for example by emphasizing the vagueness which characterizes the
content of Rodericks artistic creation and by describing one of his paintings, whose
determining qualities consist of strange spatial structures and light phenomena a
ghastly and inappropriate splendor (III, 283). That this passage refers to the storys
conclusion with its unnatural light phenomena and to the description of the vault with
Madelines coffin cannot be overlooked, but the nature of the individual references
remains an open question. For in the mysteriously lit and hermetically sealed vault in
the painting may be seen both a depiction of Rodericks wide awake and sensitive
consciousness, which knows no protective darkness, and in the parallel to
Madelines provisional burial place an indication of Rodericks mysterious
relationship to his twin sister, whom he will bury alive knowingly or unknowingly
(24). Also the meaning of the strangely condensed atmosphere of the house during
the night of the storm, together with the pestilent and mystic vapor taken up again
from the storys beginning, intensified by light effects and rendered dynamic by
whirling movements of the air, remains open for the time being in spite of the
narrators explanation in natural terms. In the atmosphere has been seen for one thing
an adumbration of the enshrouded figure of Madeline (25), for another the
desperate struggle of the house against Rodericks resistance (26), as well as a tumult
of natural elements impotently opposing the silent and sullen powers which in that
hour assert dominion over the House of Usher (27). What is in essence uncanny in
this scene might well be the vagueness of any meaning or the multitude of ambiguities
that become tangible only in the atmosphere and not evident until the final image of
the collapsing house; this atmosphere again receives its under-current of meaning
by means of subtle analogies, which point to mysterious relationships between the
outside and the inner part of the house, or the realm of the soul, respectively. For
everything alludes to everything else; there is no beginning and no end, no cause and
no effect, rather both are always united, according to Poes conviction that the created
is at the same time creator and that the unity of the universe depends on all being
related and interdependent (28).
This plurality of relationships and references to meaning is made possible by the
shaping of a scene, which is typical for Poe in that it assigns to matters of space a
dominant role as fellow actor. That is the scene in which Lady Madeline, believed
dead and buried in a subterranean vault, reappears melodramatically in a night filled
with outer and inner horrors. In this scene, which constitutes about one third of the
narrative and its climax, Roderick, Madeline, and the house form a unit of action
which expresses itself most clearly in the destruction of all [page 8:] Madelines
and Rodericks death and the collapse of the house at the end. In regard to space,
Poe uses for his mood the double contrast of outside and inside, above and below, and
the mutual intensification of visual and auditory sensations. In addition there is, as
previously mentioned, the method of condensing the atmosphere together with a
return to such now-intensified optical phenomena as clouds and pestilent vapour,
and also the correlation between man and space in the form of expressive movements.
In regard to the complex of outside-inside relationships, the strange optical
phenomena outside correspond to the inner space with its gloomy furniture and the
dark and tattered draperies, which tortured into motion by the breath of a rising
tempest, swayed fitfully to and fro upon the walls, and rustled uneasily about the
decorations of the bed (III, 290). To the mood of space, intensified by vague and
indefinable noises, the narrator responds with expressive movements that betray his
own mood-investment: he gets out of bed, dresses, paces back and forth, then
suddenly jumps up while reading. An especially intensive, mood creating effect
comes above all from the sounds, which Poe like the authors of Gothic novels
before him employs with the aim of pulling space together, as it were, in this case
of connecting the subterranean vault, from which the sounds come, with the upper
floor, where the narrator and Roderick are at the time. The greater vagueness of the
auditory sensations in comparison to the visual ones facilitates an intensification of
the uncanny; Poe achieves even greater intensification by linking the real noises with
the imaginary ones, which are described in the romance that is read aloud. Through
the slowly approaching sounds a temporal-spatial arch of tension is finally created; at
its high point the Lady Madeline, only seemingly dead, appears in the door which has
been torn open by the storm, without the narrator or reader coming to comprehend the
full significance of this event.
This significance is disclosed only at the very end of the story by a mysterious process
which the narrator observes as he flees in panic and looks back: the originally fine
crack in the masonry suddenly widens before a moon shining blood red until the
house collapses and disappears in the unfathomable mountain lake, which then closes
sullenly and silently (III, 297) on the fragments of the house of Usher. In this spatial
event meaning and development of the story is contained in nuce: the disintegration of
the building (like the death of brother and sister before) is to be understood as a sign
that matter and spirit have returned into the totality of being, from which they had
emerged before in a long process of ever greater differentiation and refinement. The
crack in the building and Rodericks (as well as Madelines) nervous agitation were
outer signs that the critical point of utmost refinement had been reached, where the
return, the chaotic precipitation (XVI, 307), and with it the dissolution, according to
Poes ideas, must necessarily follow (29). The dialectic of repulsion and
attraction, of spiritual and material principle, of individual freedom and necessary
bondage, which Poe saw as determining the universe as well as human life with its
cycle of becoming and passing away, is thus given form as a process in the narrative:
by the depiction of the refinement of all senses and intellectual capabilities in
Roderick, his psycho-physical deterioration, [column 2:] and the death-like collapse
of his twin sister Madeline (to her also, Roderick stands in a mysterious relationship
full of ambiguities), as well as by the evolution of the inorganic into organic matter
and its resulting disintegration. At the end of the story this process is contracted and in
the final scene rendered vivid once more.
The disclosure of these symbolic connotations to the reader by means of a spatial
image or process can be explained for one thing by the fact that Poe had from the very
beginning directed the referential qualities of space and the ideational elements
towards this context and thereby also towards the final event. They also prepare for
the comprehension of the symbolic quality of the final image, which refers back to the
beginning, realizes once more the total process of the narrative, and compresses it
thematically, thus enabling the reader (in contrast to the narrator) to comprehend
intuitively the twofold quality of empathy and recognition.

IV
While Poe in The House of Usher solves the problem of describing and delineating
mood-invested space by blending observed details, emotional reaction, and the
fundamentally analytical attitude of the first person narrator, he must reach for
different means in The Masque of the Red Death, for this story is told auctorially
and thus (usually) from a greater distance. Although the narrator occasionally chooses
a close focus and writes from the perspective of a certain character, the story as a
whole in contrast to The House of Usher is conspicuously impersonal in tone
all the time. Poe therefore achieves the decidedly dense atmosphere not by means of
the narrators mood-investment, but by stylizing space and the characters expressive
gestures throughout. Expressive elements in the static space relationships come to be
contrasted and the (temporal) sequence of events within these spaces is rendered
rhythmic.
From the very beginning, the description of space is aimed at making evident the two
principles which are confronted bodily at the climax of the story: the bizarre autocracy
of the individual in the person of Prince Prospero and the inexorable lawfulness of
time and death, embodied in the masque of the Red Death. Accordingly, the primary
formative principle is contrast (30), which begins with the spatial opposition of
outside and inside. As the circumscription of the setting in The House of Usher
could be explained primarily by the striving for concentration, that is by a formal
principle, here a condition of tension prevails, which has both significance for content
and at the same time existential relevance. For outside lurk danger and death; inside,
there seems to be a security which permits an intoxicating enjoyment of life. The
separation of the domains is emphasized by means of the illumination: the natural
daylight outside the house is contrasted with the artificial illumination of all the
windowless rooms by the flickering flames of the tripods. The seclusion of the
house from its surroundings, for practical reasons, to be sure, and neutral in regard to
values, thus creates the impression that an artificially created realm is arbitrarily
isolated from the realm of natural life and natural order.
The principle of contrast (like the principle of rhythmization) can also be observed in
the arrangement and decoration of the interior rooms. On the one hand, they show the
Princes preference for the bizarre by the strangely irregular and unclear arrangement
with a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards, which runs counter to the
customary arrangement of an imperial suite with its long and straight vista ( IV, 2
51); the rooms are arranged in an irregular fashion similar to the winding passages in
other stories by Poe. On the other hand, however, the presence of firm orderly lines
the entire establishment extending from East to West and its orientation towards the
seventh room (whereseven evokes the concept of the ages of man) points to an
immanent order. This impression is reinforced by the corridors on both sides of the
rooms. which follow the rhythm of the suites and by this emphasis on the directional
components, translate the irregularity of the arrangement into a kind of regularity. The
same becomes apparent in the coloration, which is uniform within each room but
changes from one room to another. The sequence of the expressive colors blue,
crimson, green, orange, white, purple, and, in the seventh room, black and red on
the one hand seems to express the Princes love of the bizarre, his extremely
individualistic autocracy and freedom; on the other hand, however, the execution of
the seventh room in black and red color tones and the breaking of the formative
principle of uniform coloration in this very room show the rhythmic encounter of the
polar forces mentioned earlier. The place standing out within this entire mood-
invested space is the last or seventh room, because it is the last of the rooms and
because it has accompanying symbolic associations tied to the number seven, to the
rooms situation toward the West or the setting sun, and to black, the color of death
(31). The most conspicuous mood-investing device is the gigantic ebony clock with
its brazen lungs, symbol of time in its double aspect as measurable time and the
power of fate, that sets an end to all life on earth. This double aspect is emphasized by
the clocks location against the western wall (IV, 252), evoking with the image of
the setting sun that of the ultimate end, while the order of time and fate is illustrated
by the monotonous movement of the pendulum, which is also set off by the rhythm of
the language (32). Even more important, however, is the striking of the clock, its tone
measuring time and creating within the suite a uniform mood in the sense of being
directed towards the end.
The mood-investment of space, however, not only builds up here as elsewhere
on the basis of objective factors but also results, as mentioned before, from the
interchange between space and man: the mood-invested characters respond to the
mood-investment of space. The black room, for instance, produced so wild a look
upon the countenances of those who entered, that there were few of the company bold
enough to set foot within its precincts at all (IV, 252). Even more impressive in this
connection are the peculiar movements of the dancers, of whom it is said, they writhe
to and fro (IV, 254). Their expressive movements the reaction to spatial mood-
investment reflect at the same time the bizarre element that characterizes the space
as a whole and causes the dancers to appear as figures parallel to Prospero,
whose [column 2:] fate they share in the end. Space and man thus form a unit of
action here as they did in The House of Usher.
The element which guides movement is sound; there is for one thing the striking of
the clock, its tone filling space and contracting it; there is for another the shrill tone of
the music, which corresponds to the bizarre interior arrangement and the eccentric
movements and here has an effect opposite to that of the clock, the effect of expansion
and dispersion. One is reminded of Poes cosmological principles of repulsion and
attraction, forces that keep the world in balance, while a disturbance of its
equilibrium through the refinement of what is individual, through repulsion, as in
The House of Usher activates the power of attraction, which leads to death (33).
In The Masque, attraction and repulsion now-are translated into expressive
movements pressing forward and receding, motion and cessation of motion and
thus are dramatized. The phantasmic play of movement to the sounds of the music is
followed, with each striking of the hour, by the dancers becoming motionless, by their
being struck dumb and the music falling silent, until with the dying away of the last
stroke dancing begins anew. Scenes of motion and cessation of motion alternate five
times in the same manner and thus divide the action in the sense of rendering it
rhythmical. While the clock strikes, the remoteness of the seventh chamber, into
which no one will venture, becomes a threatening proximity, leaving no room for
individual action. There are two possibilities for making room: receding and pressing
forward. As these two motions, opposites in their direction, follow one another, they
mark the progress of time and the approach of the high and end point of the action.
This sequence of motions becomes quite clear, for instance, when the Red Death
appears. Growing alarm is made evident by the expressive movement of receding to
the periphery of the space: the vast assembly . . . shrank from the centres of the
rooms to the walls (IV, 257); the counter movement towards the black chamber then
follows, an attempt to gain space by conquest [Bewaltigung] and by crossing
boundaries [Uberschreitung]. The irony lies in the fact that this transgression is at the
same time a result of attraction (by the clock and by death) and thus leads to chaotic
precipitation. Here the different modes of behavior of the figures of death and of the
human beings, which again are made evident by expressive movements, are
effectively contrasted. The gait of the Red Death is solemn, measured like
time, he halts only at the wall of the last chamber, that is at the outermost limit of the
space (in time) at his disposal. The others rush after him (the revellers . . . threw
themselves into the black apartment, IV, 257), their behavior is reaction, not action,
and they confirm his power again by an expressive movement as they sink dead
at the feet of the gigantic clock.
This black ebony dock, which breathes its last with the narrative figures, is the
central symbol of the story. It seems to be merely an allegorical piece of stage
property, but as shown above it is at the same time, and primarily, a part of mood-
invested space. Within this tension and its resolution lies the uniqueness of the
symbolic method in this story. The structure of the clock symbol is determined by the
double embodiment of time: as a kind of personification [page 10:] with a minute-
hand, a face, brazen lungs, and a life (IV, 253), it has the fixed, immovable
meaning of the power of fate that is time and so constitutes a closed symbol with
allegorical traits; as part of the totality of furnishings, especially in the last chamber,
as a body of sound, which divides measurable time by its striking, it belongs to mood-
invested space and directs the action. Much like the clock, the colors black and red in
the last chamber, as well as the direction of the suite from East to West, contain
elements of the closed symbol. But it is significant that the same does not apply to the
other colors; their meaning remains open to a great extent. Here again, closed and
open symbols are contrasted in dialectical manner. As to the directional component,
its closed meaning is suspended at least at times by the process of motion and the
polarization of East-West in the course of the narrated events. So it is that towards the
end of the story the Princes voice resounds from the Easternmost chamber and,
analogous to the penetrating sound of the clock (both are designated by the verb
ring), fills all the chambers of the suite. In the end, to be sure, the significance of the
clock, as of the directional component and the colors red and black (blood and death),
seems to be solely allegorical, for the duplication of the figures death by the dying
of the clock shows thesignificance of the clock to be separable from the
phenomenon. This, however, only seems to be the case: though on the one hand the
symbolic variant of the meaningful image is translated here into the allegorical one,
on the other hand the atmospheric forces of the uncanny, which were developed in the
course of the story, affect also the clock symbol and tie it to the total expression of
space which only then (together with the expressive movements of the figures)
endows it with its meaning. The clock then fulfills here the function of the ballad in
The House of Usher: it unveils meaning and at the same time, by heightening the
referential quality within itself, prevents space as a whole from becoming a closed
symbol. The clock is not the only instance of this kind. This process of translating a (
relatively) open symbol into a closed one, visible in the floor clock, can be observed
with particular clarity at the end of the story in the flames of the tripods. At first,
these lend movement to space by means of their flickering light and invest it with
mood the flames evoking only very vaguely the idea of individual life and not
until the very end does the element of meaning emerge more clearly, though without
assuming, in spire of its closedness, the character of allegory: And the life of the
ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods
expired (IV, 258).
Besides the closed spatial symbol, the poetological comments by the narrator in this
story also fulfill an interpretive function in keeping with Poes dictum: every work of
art should contain within itself all that is requisite for its own comprehension (XI,
78). As in The House of Usher, the closed spatial symbol (primarily) interprets the
fateful context, while poetic allusion concerns above all the concept of the characters.
The narrator describes the masqueraders as grotesque and arabesque, giving
here according to Kayser perhaps the most complete and appropriate definition that
the word grotesque was ever given by an author (34): [column 2:]
Be sure they are grotesque. There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and
phantasm much of what has been since seen in Hernani. There were arabesque
figures with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were delirious fancies such as
the madman fashions. There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of
the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited
disgust. To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams.
And these the dreams writhed in and about, taking hue from the rooms, and
causing the wild music of the orchestra to seem as the echo of their steps. (IV, 254)
The remarks about the grotesque and arabesque are not used here in the merely
impressionistic sense as in the title of Poes collection Tales of the Grotesque and
Arabesque (35), but serve to characterize a world view and a category of delineation
which perceives deformity as the observed and experienced nature of man and which
sees and presents this deformity as horrible and ridiculous at once. It appears here as
sensual reality misshapen or in Durrenmatts words as sensual paradox (30),
in that it orients itself by the visible exterior forms and natural proportions of the body
(for example figures with unsuited limbs). The phantasmic and distorted as
formative means of the grotesque join with dreamlike elements, opening for Poe, as
must still be shown, an opportunity to depict the unconscious; this possibility he uses
in an impressive way to impart significance to the story, its suggested meaning.
While the description of space alone creates an impression merely of the bizarre and
phantasmic, not of the ridiculous (37), since the domains are not mingled here and the
perspective remains unchanged, the grotesque arises in the counterplay of space and
man, in the materially bizarre coloring of what is human, which then appears
misshapen under the aspect of the natural. Thus the expressive movements of the
narrative figures appear distorted, mechanical, or animal-like and contain all the
characteristics of the grotesque:
The distortion in the elements, the mingling of the domains, the simultaneity of
beautiful, bizarre, horrible and repulsive elements, the fusion into a turbulent entity,
the alienation into the phantasmic and dream-like (Poe used to speak of his waking
dreams), all this has entered here into the concept of the grotesque. This world is
prepared for the invasion by the nocturnal, which will bring destruction as death in a
red mask (38).
Stated differently and examined as to function within the story, the distorted
expressive movements of the figures reflect their subconscious knowledge of their
fate, which is also embodied in the directional system of the space and in the sound of
the clock; they can escape it only accompanied by festive music, using phantasmic
masks and costumes, and making distorted movements in a room with bizarre
furnishings; with each fateful striking of the clock, however, they must respond to this
fate more consciously by turning rigid or receding or through the attempt to
overcome. Against the background of Poes cosmological concepts (39), the dialectic
of repulsion and attraction, of spiritual and material principle, which becomes
apparent in expressive movements, the fear and terror of the figures as of Roderick
Usher can be understood as the highly developed personalitys resistance against
giving up its individuality in favor of the universal cycle of repulsion and attraction,
refinement and death. At the same rime, however, the contradictory
expressive[page 11:] elements of space (phantasm and order at the same time) and the
contrast of the movements receding and pressing forward contain analogies to a
discrepancy philosophically reasoned out by Poe, the discrepancy between creator and
created, self-determination and determination by something alien to the self, which is
the final condition of every particle in the universe, especially, however, of man and
of the artist through his share in the divine (40).
With this utterly closed, logically constructed story, Poe has taken another step, even
beyond The Fall of the House of Usher, towards modern ways of presentation such
as the surrealistic and the grotesque. For the time being this brings to an end a
development which began with the Gothic novel. Poe accomplishes the integration of
space into all levels of the story: as picturesque, not to say melodramatic stage and as
fellow actor in the spatial scene; as the sign of unalterable fate (the clock), which
manifests itself in death; as the sign of the individual will to self-preservation, which
shows itself in the bizarre furnishings; and as expression of the conscious, as well as
of the subconscious, that knows of the cosmic process of becoming and passing
away, yet yields its own life to this process only unwillingly.

V
When one compares the delineation of space and the constitution of symbol in The
House of Usher and The Masque of the Red Death, common traits in the
application of narrative means emerge, which in the face of different narrative
premises point to a unified concept in Poes works. A glance at the detective stories
and landscape sketches may serve to confirm this. Conspicuous is the circumscription
of space, which gives it a hermetic character in that it has become devoid of
references to pragmatic reality. This far-reaching renunciation of mimetic traits (in the
strict sense), and the confusing confrontation of contrary symbolic phenomena, which
reaches its climax in The Masque of the Red Death, give to the delineation of space
the special mood-investment of the strange and the uncanny, the unclear and the
hidden, and stimulate reflection. Being hermetic, space at the same time is available
for various possibilities of expression and can be manipulated artistically. After the
Gothic novel had discovered mood-invested space, Poe was together with
Hawthorne first in recognizing its availability for expression and the resulting
possibilities, especially for the foreshortened presentation in the short story. Because
the short story must use its setting economically and, in contrast to the novels broader
delineation of the world, especially reflects mans reaction to a given situation, Poes
own mixture of illustrative, emotional, and ideational presentation of space is not only
an expression of the unity of effect (IX, 106) he strives for but also evidence of a
mode of presentation which is in keeping with the form of the short narrative. In
regard to the objective qualities of space, this fulfillment of the short form shows
itself in the reduction of details in favor of a stylized overall impression, and this in
turn rests on the arrangement of space according to a few important basic
elements [column 2:] which determine the expressive qualities of the details.
Directional components such as East and West above and below, outside and inside
and formal elements like the circular and the angular, the straight and the twisted, the
open and the closed, acquire their special meaning within the narrative context and are
related in the sense of being made parallel or contrasted. These static relationships are
again rendered dynamic in the spatial scene that is, a type of scene in which the
course of events is determined essentially by space as an active participant, and which
dramatizes the relationship of man and space at the climax of the narrative. This is so
not only in the tales of terror but also in the detective stories for instance, in The
Murders in the Rue Morgue the murder of the two women by an orangutan is
described from the perspective of the spatial realities and in the landscape sketches
for example, in The Domain of Arnheim the forms of the landscape, coming
together and separating with changing perspectives during the trip on the river, alone
impart to it their special character. In all cases it is important that, according to a given
delineation and in spite of certain constants of expression, mood-investment and
associative meaning of space can be varied.
In the delineation of mood-invested space, this becomes apparent in the sequential
variation of focus and presentation, that is observation, mood-investment, reflection,
observation, and so forth, the circle beginning at will, with observation as in The
Masque, with mood-investment as in The House of Usher, or with reflection as in
The Domain of Arnheim. Always, however, all stages are gone through. The fact
that the observer becomes uncertain results, on the objective side, in the narrative
spaces becoming enigmatic. Either the previously described circle of observational,
emotional, and ideational presentation creates the impression of something being in
process, something indissoluble as in the tales of terror perhaps even in Ligeia
and thereby creates the mood quality of the uncanny, which in Poes works is
brought about in particular by the partially hidden becoming perceptible, if not
atmospherically tangible; or the circle can bring about a result as in the landscape
sketches, in that the observer recognizes in nature and its details, by tracing these back
to certain ideal, harmonizing, basic forms like the circle or the meandering line (as a
connection of the straight and the circular line), the works of God and in these the
Almighty design (VI, 187).
The variability and artistic manipulatability of hermetic space also applies to its
contextual significance. It can be seen in the variability of the manner of relating
phenomenon to meaning. In the detective stories, such as The Purloined Letter, Poe
can entirely forgo symbolic significance and concentrate meaning solely in the
appearance of space, its observational qualities, or, as in The Murders in the Rue
Morgue, he can introduce additional mood qualities. Central in both cases, however,
is the pragmatic or intuitively rational solution of an enigma. which can be fathomed
only with the help of spatial details. Poes use of the symbol thus exhibits two
characteristics: for one, the multiple variation in mode of linking meaning and
phenomenon between the two poles of symbolic atmosphere and objective allegory,
snaking it impossible to limit Poe to only one way of using the
symbol [page 12:] (such as the allegorical); for another, the supplementary use of
different modes of connection, such as the open and the closed symbol with its many
variants. Through the atmospheric references of the former, the quality of the mood-
invested space is attained, while the rational logical references of the latter (together
with poetological comments) clarify the meaning of the spatial entity. The
complementary use of both, or the integration of the closed symbol into the narrative
context and thereby into the narrative course of time with its changing conditions,
does not allow the abstractable meaning, in the sense perhaps of Poes cosmological
concepts, to predominate, and thus provides that the atmospheric elements of the
mood invested space are not destroyed by being transferred to the pattern of the
observed space (which underlies the allegorical space arrangements). This is
accomplished, as becomes especially dear in connection with the clock symbol in
The Masque, by means of the firm establishment of even the closed objective
symbol within the greater unit of the mood-invested space. At the same time, and in
the sense of varying and enhancing the sequence as well as rendering it rhythmical,
the tendency toward in creasing clarification of the under or mystic current of
meaning by means of the closed symbol and poetological comments becomes
apparent in the course of the narrative. For the disoriented observer in Landors
Cottage, for instance, the contemplated details at first emerge only gradually into full
clarity from the mood-invested space and then merge again into the design, the
(divine) principle of order and composition which is basic to space and invests it with
mood. Moreover, besides this tendency to clarify, the inclination to dissolve again the
all too plain rational-logical analogies within the events becomes notice able
especially in the tales of terror so that the balance between mood-investment and
the function of associative reference remains intact.
The manipulatability of the mood-invested and symbolic hermetic space becomes
further evident not only in the manifold possibilities of relating phenomenon to
meaning, with which Poe experiments, but also in the quality of meaning and
therefore in the determination of content. On the one hand, Poe has the Ushers house
appear as a milieu symbol in the early view of the narrator and thus as a symbol
for the ideas and forces of the environment that determines the inhabitants; on the
other hand, he uses it as an analogical symbol which has the function of conveying
insights into existence. As milieu symbol, it clarifies causal relations between house
and inhabitants; as analogical symbol, it interprets the decay of personality and points
to parallel developments in matter and spirit, space and man, in keeping with Poes
cosmological ideas. For direct statements about the meaning of space and its symbolic
references, the possibilities of variation have a similarly wide range. The immediate
conceptual definition is at its most direct in the landscape sketches, which are aimed
at illuminating the divine design in nature. Finally, the many ambiguities in Poes
spatial symbolism become apparent not only in the contrasting or combining of
different kinds of symbols, which articulate their meaning more or less plainly, but
also in the expressional ambivalence of the individual basic forms of symbols and
complexes of direction. Poe develops the same basic [column 2:] forms the
contrast of the open and the closed, the high and the deep, the linearly extended and
the convoluted, and so forth for the space full of horror as for the spatial idyll
(The Domain of Arnheim, Landors Cottage). The rounded and (approximately)
circular forms reflect the artificial, hallucinatory closedness of a prison-like space, or
one marked by supernatural phenomena (The Pit and the Pendulum, Ligeia); they
artistically heighten the immanent lines of nature in the sense of the divine design,
as in The Domain of Arnheim; or they give symbolic expression to idyllic isolation
and security, as in Landors Cottage. In the liberation of detail for purposes of
expression and in the manipulatability of the symbolic qualities of space, there appear
traits which clearly point beyond Poes time. In the reality of represented detail and
the unreality of the total impression, in the combination of open and closed symbol, in
the advantageous use of the expressive ambiguity of the spatial pattern, in short, in the
delineation of a hermetic space and the recognition of its artistic manipulatability,
there appear traits of a mode of presentation which aims at intermingling different
spheres of reality much as in such works of modern literature as
Kafkas Strafkolonie. To be sure, in Poes works the combination of the subjective
with the objective is not yet achieved by means of a mental montage of particles of
reality but rather through the atmosphere of the mood-invested space, which fuses
objective reality and subjective experience in an imaginary but coherent world, into
that whole which proves to be more than the sum of its parts (41).



TRANSLATORS NOTE
* Translators Note: mood-invested space renders the originals gestimmter
Raum. Gestimmt is from the verb stimmen, which can meanto tune, for
example a musical instrument, or to put into (a certain kind of) mood, for example a
person. Here the verb is part of a coined term that runs throughout the article as a
leitmotif. Professor Hoffmann discusses its meaning in the following paragraphs and
its source in footnote 14, the English equivalents mood-invested space, mood-
invested, and mood-investment for its various forms have been selected from
options suggested by him. [[This note appears on page 2, at the bottom of column 1.]]



NOTES
(1) F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of
Emerson and Whitman (New York: 1941), pp. 242f.; compare also Ch. Feidelson,
Jr., Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago: 1953), p. 104; on the genesis of
American symbolism, see especially U. Brumm, Die religiose Typologie im
amerikanischen Denken. Ihre Bedeutung fur die amerikanische Literatur- und
Geistesgeschichte (Leiden: 1963).
(2) On the development of correlative thought in the eighteenth century, compare for
particulars E. Wassermann, Nature Moralized: The Divine Analogy in the Eighteenth
Century, ELH, 20 (1953), 41.
(3) Compare also Emersons essay about Nature, Complete Works of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, 11 vols. (Cambridge, 1883), I, 32f.
(4) From the Preface to the Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, quoted
according to A. H. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe. A Critical Biography (New York, 1941),
p. 289.
(5) The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Riverside Ed., 15 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.,
1882), II, 495.
(6) On Poes relationship to modern literature compare among others [page 13:] H. B.
Parkes, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville: An Essay in Sociological Criticism, Partisan
Review, 16 (1949), 164f.; L. Hofrichter, From Poe to Kafka, Univ. of Toronto
Quarterly, 29 (195960), 405-419; H. H. Kuhnelt,Die Bedeutung von Edgar Allan Poe
fur die englische Literatsur (Innsbruck, 1949); H. Levin, The Power of
Blackness (London, 1958), p. 126 (Faulkner); P. F. Quinn, The French Face of Edgar
Allan Poe (Carbondale, 111., 1957), passim.
(7) Quotations in the following are from The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed.
J. A. Harrison, 17 vols. (1902; New York, rpt. 1965). Volume and page number
appear in parentheses in the text.
(8) Compare for instance J. P. Roppolo, Meaning and The Masque of the Red
Death, Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R. Regan (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,
1967), p. 144: what emerged was not, certainly, a short story; nor was it, except by
the freest definition, a tale. On the other hand, H. Galinsky in a comparison of the
story with Hemingways The Killers rightly sees typical traits of the American short
story in The Masque (Beharrende Strukturzuge im Wandel eines Jahrhunderts
amerikanischer Kurzgeschichte [Persisting Structural Characteristics over a
Hundred Years of Change in the American Short Story, shown as they occur in E. A.
Poes The Masque of the Red Death and Ernest Hemingways The Killers], Die
Neueren Sprachen, Beiheft 3 (Frankfurt, o. J. [1957]); see for example, P. 41).
(9) R. Wilbur, The House of Poe, Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 104. Jean-
Paul Webers views are similar in Edgar Poe or the Theme of the Clock, ibid., pp.
79-97.
(10) Compare P. F. Quinn, Four Views of Edgar Poe, Jahrtnch fur
Amerikastudien, 5 (1960), 142: In an effort to account for what is felt as their [the
stories] overall symbolic significance, we turn back, in analysis, to individual details.
And these, we usually find, are lacking in symbolic resonance.
(11) A. Staats, Edgar Allan Poes symholistische Erzuhlkunst (Heidelberg, 1967), p.
69; compare in general pp. 62f.
(12) See F. H. Link, Edgar Allan Poe (Frankfurt/Bonn, 1968), pp. 314f.; M. Beebe,
The Universe of Roderick Usher, Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 121-133.
(13) Compare here W. Blair, Poes Conception of Incident and Tone in the
Tale, Modern Philology, 41 (1944), 228-240.
(14) The expression gestimmter Raum [mood-invested space] comes from E.
Stroker, Philosophische Untersuchungen zum Raum (Frankfurt, 1965), who aims to
lay the foundation for geometric space, but in an extensive first part investigates the
gelebten Raum [lived space]. Characterizing this lived space, which she
subdivides into Aktionsraum [space of action], Anschanungsraum [observed
space], and gestimmten Raum [mood-invested space], she follows psychological
investigations, above all those of K. v. Durckheim, Untersuchungen zum gelebten
Raum, Neue Psychologische Studien(Muncher, 1932), VI, 387f.: For the self, lived
space is a medium of bodily realization, complementary form or amplification, threat
or preservation; it is a setting to pass through or to remain in, an alien land or home, a
material space, a place of fulfillment and opportunity for unfolding, a resistance and
boundary; it is a voice and antagonist of this self in its momentary reality of being and
of life (p. 389). The following characterization of mood-invested space, in so far as
general, not literary aspects are involved, is based on E. Stroker, pp. 22-53.
(15) The stylization of even vivid details by the author, directed at a knowledge
that he wishes to convey to the reader and which contains his interpretive position, is
emphasized also by K. Hamburger Zum Strukturproblem der epischen und
dramatischen Dichtung, DVJ, 25 (1951), 20f.
(16) Compare V. Buranelli, Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1961), pp. 46f.; Link, Edgar
Allan Poe, pp. 44f.
(17) The most important characteristics of Poes buildings in regard to size, situation,
age, and decay, and of interior space in respect to its shapes, furnishings, and light
effects, have been compiled in a kind of catalog by M. Kane in Edgar Allan Poe and
Architecture, Sewanee Review, 40 (1932), 149-160; in the context of his
interpretation of Poes stories, R. Wilbur, The House of Poe, sees the same
examples as dream allegories. For example, cellars or catacombs, whenever they
appear, . . . . [in Wilburs view [column 2:] stand] for the irrational part of the mind
(p. 117).
(18) On the concept of the symbol, compare among others the survey and ample
bibliographic references in E. Frenzels Stoff-, Motiv- und Symbolforschung (Stuttgart,
1963); see also W. Y. Tindall, The Literary Symbol (New York, 1955); and
Feidelson, Symbolism; on the symbol in narrative literature, see especially H.
Levin, Symbolism and Fiction (Charlottesville, Virginia, 1956), and U. Brumm,
Symbolism and the Novel, Partisan Review, 25 (1958), 329-342.
(19) Tindall, Literary Symbol, p. 10.
(20) For the special conditions in the short story and the novel, those investigations of
the symbol that have proven fruitful seek to differentiate between different kinds,
taking into consideration the degree and the kind of relation to reality of the symbolic
object, as well as its functional character in the narrative work. In this connection, the
already mentioned investigations by Tindall, Levin and Brumm must be emphasized
above all. Tindall distinguishes between sign and symbol and defines the latter in
regard to form as analogical embodiment and in regard to content as a complex of
feeling and thought (Literary Symbol, pp. 12f.). While including the sign, Levin
distinguishes, on the basis of the clarity of the meaning, four descending levels of
acceptance, which extend from the conventional level ( the Eagle as stare symbol),
the explicit level (Hawthornes scarlet letter), and the implicit level to the
fourth conjectural level (Symbolism and Fiction, pp. 39f.). Brumms starting point
seems the most fruitful; according to the kind of connection between phenomenon and
significance, she differentiates between two main kinds of symbols and designates
them as (1) cause-linked realistic symbol and (2) transcendent or magic symbol
(p. 337). As the designations indicate, the realistic symbol is distinguished by being
firmly rooted in reality (p. 333), as well as by its rendering visible the hidden causes
for real situations and phenomena (p. 334). The transcendent symbol, on the other
hand, stresses the referential character of the object, which represents a transcendent
embodiment of the intended meaning (p. 334). The above differentiation of milieu
symbol and analogical symbol continues this distinction on the basis of content.
(21) The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), I, 161.
(22) The judgment by critics ranges from Quinns deprecatory remark . . . a poem
which serves small purpose (The French Face of Edgar Poe, p.259) to Wilburs
identification of the house of Usher with the haunted palace and likening these to
Rodericks mind, finding in the ballad in addition a possible key to the general
meaning of Poes architecture (The House of Poe, p. 107).
(23) It is significant that opinions about the particulars of the houses symbolic
significance diverge widely For example, Buranelli sees Roderick and Madeline
Usher as two faculties of the same soul . . of which their mansion is the body
(Edgar Allan Poe, p. 77); for E. H. Davidson, on the other hand, the house is the total
human being, its three parts functioning as one (Poe: A Critical Study [Cambridge,
Mass., 1957], p. 196). D. Abel finds in the house the qualities . . . of Life-Reason,
corrupted and threatened by Death-Madness (A Key to the House of Usher, Univ. of
Toronto Quarterly, 18 [1948-49], 180), and E. A Robinson speaks of the cosmic
tendencies and the cyclic laws in the universe, which also become evident in the
house (Order and Sentience in The Fall of the House of Usher, PMLA, 76 [1961],
79). Feidelson calls the house a symbol of the end of rational order (Symbolism,
p. 35) L. Spitzer stresses the poetic expression of sociological-deterministic ideals
which were in the air in 1839 (A Reinterpretation of The Fall of the House of
Usher, Comparative Literature, 4 [1952], 360). Weber goes so far as to say that the
House of Usher clearly represents the clock, the inhabitants are the hands that
dwell in it and are wholly governed by its mechanism (Edgar Poe, p. 87), and
Wilbur, who sees in the story a dream of the narrator which leads him into the Tiefen
des eigenen Selbst [depths of his own self], comes to this conclusion: Since
Roderick is the embodiment of a state of mind in which falling falling asleep is
imminent, it is appropriate that the building which symbolizes his mind should
promise at every moment to fall (The House of Poe, p. 109). [page 14:]
(24) These rather subtle analogies have often caused confusion. Either they are
ignored by critics, or they are merely enumerated without commentary as examples of
Poes mode of composition (M. Beebe, The Fall of the House of
Pyncheon, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 11 [1956-57], 5; Abel, A Key, p. 183;
Robinson, Order, p. 80) or they are roundly rejected (J. O. Bailey What Happens in
The Fall of the House of Usher? American Literature,35 [1963-64], 455f.). Only
Spitzer attempts to establish in general terms a connection between the picture and the
subterranean vaults of the House of Usher. How altogether contradictory the
interpretations are also becomes evident in the attempts to interpret the painting, in
which anticipation of death and nakedness of design converge (Spitzer,
Reinterpretation, p. 355), or which represents an impromptu expression of the evil
which has mastered his sensibility (Abel, A Key, p. 180), or which finally gives
concrete form to a sort of conjuration: a charm against the actual dark vault, which
he hoped to purge with saintly light before laying Madelines body there (Bailey
What Happens? pp. 455f.). The attempts at interpretation become conspicuously all
the more absurd the more precisely they seek to ascertain logical meaning
confirmation of the atmospheric, not logical mode of forming analogies in Poes tales
of terror.
(25) Spitzer, Reinterpretation, p. 356. Compare also Robinson, Order, p. 78.
(26) Bailey, What Happens? p. 461.
(27) Abel, A Key, p. 184.
(28) Eureka, Complete Works, XVI, 314.
(29) Compare also Robinson, Order, p. 81.
(30) On the Prinzip des Gegensatzes [principle of contrast] in style and structure see
the interesting interpretation by Galinsky, Strukturzuge, pp. 21). On the contrasting
of tone from the beginning to the end compare Blair, Poes Conception, p. 238, as
well as Poes remarks on the effect of contrast and the force of contrast in The
Philosophy of Composition, Complete Works, XIV, 205.
(31) On Poes preference for the expressive colors black, white, red, compare W. O.
Clough, The Use of Color Words by Edgar Allan Poe, PMLA, 45 (1930), 598-613.
See also Galinsky, Strukturzuge, p. 14. Here, too, the technique of repetition and
variation becomes apparent: The redness and the horror of blood are mentioned
initially as the .-nark of the Red Death; at the end, the halls of . . . revel are blood-
bedewed. Scarlet as the hue of the windows has its counterpart in the signs of
pestilential death at the beginning (p. 250) and in the scarlet horror on the face of
the figure at the end (p. 256). That the vocabulary here is assigned a special role in
integrating space is evident also in the use of the word shroud for the wall covering
and later for the garments of the Red Death.
(32) On rendering language rhythmical, compare Galinsky, Strukturzuge, pp. 11ff.
(33) Eureka, Complete Works, XVI, 208, 213f.
(34) W. Kayser, Das Groteske. Seine Gestaltung in Malerei und
Dichtung (Oldenburg/Hamburg, 1957), p. 84.
(35) On the interpretation of the title, compare especially A. H. Quinn, Edgar Allan
Poe, p. 289, and Levin, The Power of Blackness, p. 108.
(36) F. Durrenmatt, Theaserprohleme (Zurich, 1955), p. 48: . . . the grotesque is only
a sensual expression, a sensual paradox, the shape of a misshapen being. . . .
(37) On the demarcation of the phantasmic from the grotesque, compare also G.
Mensching, Das Groteske im Drama, Diss., (Bad Godesberg, 1961), pp. 36f.
(38) Kayser, Das Groteske, p. 84. Even though Kaysers formulations here are
somewhat vague, his assertion, too summary for the story as a whole, does fit the
expressive movements of the figures because grotesque tendencies to distort form as
well as content become apparent here. By linking these, A. Heidsick (Das Groseske
und das Absurde im modernen Drama [Stuttgart, 1969]) has recently sought in
contrast to Mensching (Das Groteske) to distinguish the grotesque as a realistic
formative principle from the absurd.
(39) On this, see also some suggestions in J. P. Roppolo, Meaning, pp. 143f.
(40) Eureka, Complete Works, XVI, 314.
(41) Quinn, Four Views of Edgar Poe, p. 142