Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to Books Up Close, I'm Chris Lloyd. This is the show for readers, writers and anyone interested in how texts get made. In today's Halloween special, I talk to Emily Ogden about Edgar Allan Poe's story The Telltale Hut from 1843, as well as Emily's own new book on Poe, Darkness Becomes Bright, The Haunted Life and Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe.
Speaker: Emily is the author of On Not Knowing, How to Love and Other Essays, and Credulity, A Cultural History of US Mesmerism. The recipient of Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, and a Mellon Fellowship in the Columbia Society of Fellows, she is a professor of English at the University of Virginia.
Speaker: Emily, welcome. Thank you so much for having me, Chris. Of course, i first came to your work, I think, and it it was on a podcast and I can't remember what it was on, but someone was talking about your book on not knowing.
Speaker: And I was like, this sounds very much up my street. And as we were saying before we jumped on the call, this UK cover is just like, I saw it in the shop and I was like, this is everything I need in a book. It's this luminous s lime green kind of obscuring the text. And it's these short little essays. I don't know, I was obsessed with this book.
Speaker: And then your publicist on Instagram kind of posted something like, there's a new book about Poe coming out. I think you'll like it. And I was like, oh yeah, send it my way. and he was like, oh, it's by this ah writer, Emily Ogden. i was like, are you serious? Send it to me Thank you. So very, very excited to talk to you in this Halloween moment, which spoiler listeners, it is not Halloween as recording, but we're just pretending it is.
Speaker: We're ready. We're ready for cool weather. Exactly. Before we get into Poe and your book, I wonder, I ask everyone this, like, what are your thoughts and feelings about close reading? What's your relationship to it?
Speaker: Well, I was taught how to close read by one of the great close readers of the 20th century, Helen Wendler, who was a tutor in college and also my the lecturer for the course that made me an English major. So I feel really strongly about the importance of close reading. I've just started teaching a class in honor of Professor Wendler called Poems, Poets, Poetry, which was the title of the class she taught, um which is really just about teaching people to close read.
Speaker: Sometimes people say we don't know what we mean by close reading. And I i see the point because it is a practice rather than a sort of set of precepts. But for me, it just means... treating the speech in the poem kind of like it's a dramatic monologue in some cases. That's how how Helen Vendler often did it. And so that works really well with Poe, who, especially in his stories, writes these incredible first-person dramatic monologues from the perspective of criminals, like the one that we're going to talk about today.
Speaker: Yeah, that's interesting. The voice is... Yeah, so central to what he's doing and to what you're doing in Darkness Becomes Bright in that you're kind of playing with you as author and then you're kind of like not using quote marks always when you're quoting him, use italics. um And then you're talking about other people who engage with Poe's voice.
Speaker: So I wonder whether you could tell listeners just a little bit about Darkness Becomes Bright, how you approached it, the kind of form of the thing. Absolutely. I think of it as a group biography of one person. Group biography is one of my favorite genres. And um Poe is somebody who has inspired these incredibly fervent attachments, maybe most famously Charles Baudelaire, the great French modernist poet and critic who who read Poe and then became, i think it's not too strong to say, obsessed with him, and translated him. If you look at Baudelaire's works, a third of it is translations of Poe. And so he's not the only one. There are many other people in history and living today for whom Poe has this role. So I tell the story of Poe's life in the book, but I also interspersed it with stories of Poe's readers, people who we know and people who we don't know, for whom they, in effect, lived as Poe. you know, Baudelaire said he felt as though he'd written Poe's stories. Of course, as a translator, he sort of did. And so I think of Poe as living his life, which was it was relatively short, but also living these other lives in his readers who have felt this keen identification with him.
Speaker: And now, like this story is probably one of his most famous, I imagine, right? Like I know it's definitely read and taught in kind of US s school curricula, right? Less so in the UK, but like it's big, but it you know, it's so, it's in the popular imagination is a Simpsons episode, right? Like it's very known And I wonder, some of this book is kind of speculative in the way you're kind of working through the text and his life.
Speaker: Like, how do you think Poe would feel about people close reading him, like all this time later? Like, I know he was interested in his legacy, right? But like... Yes, he was. Yeah, it's such an interesting question. I think he would be delighted with his canonical status. And I think that the Baudelaire reception of Poe would have really delighted him. Although they were alive at the same time, he never knew about it. Oh, right. Yeah. Though his mother-in-law, who he's very close to, he may have known because Baudelaire dedicated ah one of his translations to her and sent it to her. So she might have known. So he'd be thrilled to be canonical. And probably he'd be thrilled that that the genres that he pioneered, the detective story and and horror, are so profitable. It's very difficult to watch anything on Netflix that doesn't have a Poe you know ah lineage in some way. But I think that the practice of close reading would probably feel pretty alien to him because it's not the way that he practiced criticism at all. You know, he didn't look closely at the words. He looked at the whole shape of the thing. And if you look closely at words, he was primarily looking at meter, sometimes inspired by his own classical education. So thinking about meter differently than we do in English. And I also think it might surprise him and maybe not totally please him that it's his sensational stories for which he's best known. Because what he valued the most, I think, was his poetry. That was where he thought that his ambitions were the loftiest. And with the exception of The Raven and maybe Annabelle Lee, his poems have not stood the test of time the way that his stories have.
Speaker: There are diehard fans of the poems, but the stories are really what people love um and what has has made him who he is, including great poets like Baudelaire. Baudelaire liked some of his poems, but he loved the stories. So that's how I think he would receive it.
Speaker: So on last year's Halloween episode, we talked about Dracula and went back to a passage with a colleague of mine who's like a horror specialist. And it was really fun to go back to the text because like, wait, this is really weird. Like in a very, like so overblown and melodramatic, like ways you would say, please don't write like this, right? If you were teaching someone how to do creative writing, you know, yeah don't do like, and then, you know, like which he does throughout the book. It's hilarious. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: I wanted to, just like ah as a slight question, what you think Poe's relationship is in the kind of gothic horror, terror, does it diminish him if we only read him in that way? what does it open up?
Speaker: just Just a kind of a thought as we're, <unk>ve I've picked him for this Halloween moment, but like. Yeah, no, I think that's a really important part of who he was. I think that These are the stories that he wrote to sell, and they did sell. and he he wrote There's a fairly famous letter that he wrote to a magazine editor, the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, saying that after some people had complained about another sensational tale, Berenice, about a man who extracts his cousin's teeth while he's in some kind of state of...
Speaker: I don't know, it's a super weird story. if People complained about this story being undecorous and Poe said, regardless of what people say about the decorum that they want observed, this is what sells. So let me write some more of them for you and then see what happens to the circulation of your magazine. So I think it is fair to read him this way because he was really good at figuring out what people wanted. I also think that horror is a ah genre that in a way is like posing for us now one of the oldest and deepest questions about literature, which is the the question of tragedy. Why do we want to watch things that if they were happening in real life, we would hate to see? so
Speaker: Tragedy is certainly alive as a genre now in theater, but um but where we see most that strange paradox of the human response to art is really in horror. And I think Poe can help us to think about that. My my account of why we want to see these things is that there is in human beings a desire, po called it the desire for the perverse, that draws us to those things that are bad for us simply because they're bad for us. And in life, we often have to resist that desire, but in our reading of horror, we don't. And it may not be good for us to do that, but it it isn't killing us. And I think that that's that's really an important part of the function of art. And it it lets us feel less alone in those perverse impulses too, which I think is important.
Speaker: h And this one, the Telltale Heart, is such a funny story in a way because it's like we know what the person has done, right? Like the narrator, we know what he's done and he's like, I've gotten away with it.
Speaker: And then the end of the story, which we're going to read now, is like where all kind of unravels and he talks himself into like exclaiming that he's done it. It's such like a... at the very beginning of the genre, kind of of, like the horror of the terror that he's already kind of unpacking it, right? He's already inverting it in this story.
Speaker: It's not a like whodunit, like we know whodunit. I'm always interested in these kind of genre play. that's right We think we know genre so well. And at the very beginning, people were like, I'm just going to mess with this. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. There's very little suspense in Poe's most frightening stories. There's a little bit of suspense in the detective stories, the Perlin letter. and the murders in the Rue Morgue being the most famous two of those. But in his scarier stories, you know exactly what's happened. They're based on a genre that's lost to us, the the gallows confession. So people would people were very interested in what would murderers say when they knew they were dying the next day, because they no longer have anything to lose.
Speaker: juridically speaking, but they have a lot to be loose and to be lost in terms of their immortal soul. Like they they need to tell the truth and be shriven and on some level, even though America is not a Catholic country, that idea is still alive. So people imagine that the murder is really going to tell you what the truth is as they as they go to die. And and some of Poe's greatest stories are based on that idea. The telltale heart, the black cat, the imp of the perverse are all based on the idea of the gallus confession.
Speaker: So you're right. It's not suspenseful at all. But what it's really about is the psychology of the criminal. And that we do remain really interested in. The idea that of the criminal mind. you know this This remains a fascination. Why do people kill? And for Poe, there's often a very strange reason or no reason at all, as we see in this story.
Speaker: Yeah. Okay. Let's hear the end of the story first. Like if you want to set up where we are in the plot, that'd be great. But for listeners, if you haven't read it in a while, go back and read it. It's a really short story as well. Like very short.
Speaker: You can find it online in a myriad places, but we're going look at the last couple of paragraphs because they're to me the most fun. But yeah, if you want to say a little bit about it before you read it. Yeah. So it's a, it's narrated in the first person by a man who is trying primarily to convince us that he's not insane. So he admits that he has murdered someone, but he's trying to tell us like, could an insane guy have done this? Could an insane guy have done that? and He's telling the story of having killed an old man, not for his money or for any other reason, but because he couldn't stand this man's eye, his pale blue vulture eye, as he puts it with the film of So he's killed him. He's buried him under the floorboards. And the next morning,
Speaker: The police have knocked on his door because shrieking was heard in the night and he's let them in and he's shown them around the house so that they know nothing's untoward here. And it seems like he's getting away with it. And then things, as you say, start to unravel. So this is the passage that that we chose.
Speaker: The officers were satisfied. My manner had convinced them. I was singularly at ease. They sat and while I answered cheerily, they chatted of familiar things.
Speaker: But ere long, I felt myself getting pale and wished them gone. My head ached and I fancied a ringing in my ears, but still they sat and still chatted.
Speaker: The ringing became more distinct. It continued and became more distinct. I talked more freely to get rid of the feeling, but it continued and gained definitiveness until at length I found that the noise was not within my ears.
Speaker: No doubt I now grew very pale. but I talked more fluently and with a heightened voice. Yet the sound increased and what could I do? It was a low, dull, quick sound, much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton.
Speaker: I gasped for breath and yet the officers heard it not. I talked more quickly, more vehemently, but the noise steadily increased. I arose and argued about trifles in a high key and with violent gesticulations, but the noise steadily increased.
Speaker: Why would they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides as if excited to fury by the observations of the men, but the noise steadily increased.
Speaker: Oh God, what could I do? phoned, I raved, I swore. i swung the chair upon which I had been sitting and graded it upon the boards, but the noise arose overall and continually increased.
Speaker: It grew louder, louder, Louder and still, the men chatted pleasantly and smiled. Was it possible they heard not?
Speaker: Almighty God, no. No, they heard, they suspected, they knew. They were making a mockery of my horror. This I thought, and this I think.
Speaker: but anything was better than this agony. Anything was more tolerable than this derision. I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer. I felt that I must scream or die.
Speaker: And now again, hark, Louder, louder, louder, louder. Villains, I shrieked. Dissemble no more. I admit the deed.
Speaker: Tear up the planks. Here, here, it is the beating of his hideous heart. Thank you so much for reading it. um It's great to hear as well. Like you read it on the page and it's one thing when you hear it, the, yeah, the voice-ness of this is so present and it feels so modern as well in a way. I know people say that. ah usually find that quite trite, but it doesn't sound like a 19th century American story to me, like this does not sound like Hawthorne or, you know, some of those kind of people.
Speaker: There's something very much about the language in its kind of directness. ah Yeah. Yeah. Poe, in this story, Poe achieves a kind of immediacy that he doesn't always achieve. Like there there are passages in Poe where you think that his style is not so great. He's using the passive voice all the time. You kind of want to get out the red pen, but then you you can see it in this story as being a deliberate use of pacing where when the narration is cooler, he uses circumlocutions, the passive voice, et cetera. But when things get hotter, it it becomes like you say, quick, immediate, strong. And I think that is one reason that this story is such a well-known one that he,
Speaker: he really achieves that here in a way that is probably, it's probably one of his best stories, I think too. Yeah, there's a real like ratcheting up. um I spoke recently to the novelist, Karis Davis about her novels. And she said, when she's editing and she goes back through, she's like, oh, I really need to, she says, raise the music.
Speaker: And that raising the music in her words is like, I need more intensity. And here it's like, he's raising the music tos like full blast, right? He's like, yeah yeah like slowly turning up that volume knob as the story goes along. Till the very end, you're like, oh my God, what is he going to do? Right? Like, yeah even though i know the ending, debate where he's like, could do they know? Can they hear it? And he's dragging his chair across. It's just like, oh my God, yeah please stop. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah, there are parts of it that are almost like stage directions to a reader, you know, it says louder, louder, or louder. And the the last one is italicized. So you sort of know what you're you're supposed to be doing at one and the same time what he's saying.
Speaker: It's giving information about the story, but it also seems like it's giving you directions for how you should hear the voice. Yeah. Just so interesting. And like, so that obviously we've kind of, I've cut this at a particular point, but it begins with like these very three direct sentences, right? The officers were satisfied. My manner had convinced them.
Speaker: I was singularly at ease. Although even that my manner had convinced, the manner isn't is italicized, And you're like, OK, your manner had convinced them, but he's kind of suggesting that something else might not. Right. Yeah. The three very direct sentences. And they sat.
Speaker: And while I answered cheerily, they chatted of familiar things. was thinking about like that familiar things as a phrase. You know, Poe is so interested in the uncanny. Right. what What we might call the unfamiliar or the familiar that seems unfamiliar. It's just just like a striking word to use, right? Not yeah they chatted mindlessly or they chatted about whatever, but of familiar things. And you're like, hmm, means something else is coming. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that is really masterful about this passage is that even though the narrator himself is in this
Speaker: state of panic un and hysteria. At the same time, you're able to sort of see through the hysteria that maybe at least at the beginning, the officers don't know. um And so you can, you can sort of, even though he's telling you, you can sort of see him from their perspective and start to wonder, Well, when he when he says he talked more freely, you know, did did he seem insane yet then? You know, did he seem insane by the time he says, i talked more quickly, more vehemently?
Speaker: you know, by the time he says a second time that they were still chatting, you begin to wonder if they really were still chatting or if that's just what he saw. yeah But by the time he he says, phoned, I raved, I swore, i swung the chair upon which I had been sitting.
Speaker: then you have to think that they must not still be chatting pleasantly and smiling. Surely waving a chair around would disrupt that. right And so it's funny how the the familiarity flips. At the beginning of the passage, it shows that there's going to be this intrusion of the uncanny into the familiar. as saying By the end, the fact that he says they're chatting pleasantly is telling you that he's not perceiving them accurately anymore. Because he just can't be. That's not possible. Or he's not perceiving his own actions accurately. I guess that's the other possibility. But some somehow, they've in his mind, they've divided so far. It just doesn't seem possible that the officers are seeing that wide of a division. Either they suspect,
Speaker: like he thinks, or he's actually holding it together better than he thinks. It's hard to know which it is. Yeah. Perception is key, right? Even that line, but Eilong, I felt myself getting pale, which is a really interesting mixture of um sensation, right? Like not, I yeah i thought I would look pale or I felt myself feeling cold, but like, I felt pale and you're like, okay. yeah I wish that my head ached and I fancied a ringing in my ears, which even there, like, does that mean he thinks he hears a ringing or like he does hear a ringing or fancied also conjures up like, like he's imagining, like, as in he's bringing into being the ringing, right? Almost. right there' There's multiple ways you could read that fancied, I suppose.
Speaker: That's right. And I think one way to think about it is that over the course of the passage, the sound is getting louder and more distinct. And so in some ways, the quietest thing that one could hear would be something that one isn't sure whether one's imagining it or it's really there.
Speaker: And it's possible to imagine things, even without being crazy, it's possible to imagine things that are that quiet. Like, did I really, you know, especially if you're in ah an environment that has some background hum,
Speaker: Did I hear a voice or did I imagine that that was a voice? And in his case, it's, did I hear a ringing in my ears? And then we realize, oh, the ringing is outside of his ears. Oh, we don't know quite what it is unless we have read the story before. But there's something getting louder and louder and louder. then eventually you hear it's a heartbeat.
Speaker: Yeah. So, yeah, it's it's part of what's happening is that he's describing how sensation arises and how it moves from hallucination to sensation.
Speaker: Yeah, like from the mind to the body and yeah, like out into the world and back into the mind. Like he's like, as you say, if this is a... you know, real kind of interior exploration of the mind, but he's very good at rooting it in the body as well.
Speaker: Right. It goes very quickly from the brain to the body. And this is like one of the most striking things about this story that I want to ask you about is like the use of the dash, right? Right. Oh yeah. But also in this next sentence, he uses three colons and two dashes, which I'm like three colons. i only think I've ever seen a sentence where there's like three colons where the, the sentence almost is kind of like gives birth to more thought or something. yeah And the dashes are just so they they run throughout the story, right? It's not just the end bit. It's like they run throughout as though like thought kind of broken or, and obviously he wasn't reading Emily Dickinson at this moment, but like,
Speaker: I don't know. that i am'm always interested. Like the two of them are writing with this, this dash that does so much on the page that I'm like, maybe they were talking to each other. I don't know. But um this, yeah, this is too early for it.
Speaker: But, but you're right. It is. And I think he is using it in a way that's not so dissimilar from how Dickinson would later use it, which is to create rhythm, you know, it's, breath in some way. Yeah.
Speaker: Poe is a great reader of his work. People love to hear him read The Raven. And so I think she thought rhythmically and in prose and in poetry too, he uses the dash to create rhythm, I think. The colon, and I'm less sure about what's going on there, whether that's just sort of a piling up of clauses to indicate nested thought.
Speaker: But the dash, at least when I'm reading it out loud, it feels to me like, again, a kind of stage direction for him how should you pause? Yeah, definitely pause and, but also like the break in thought, right? Both the continuity of thought and the break in thought, which Dickinson is also good at, right? Like giving you a very simple, simple line. Then you're like, wait, that's not quite so simple because you've broken it here.
Speaker: But yeah, I don't know. The ringing became more distinct, colon, dash. It continued and became more distinct, colon. I talked more freely to get rid of the feeling, colon, but it continued. It's almost like, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, he's like talk. The narrator is like talking himself through the thing. It's like it's even amping up as he's saying aloud to us. You can see, too, he's struggling to create in language gradations of noise. So he wants there to be something like 20 gradations in distinctness and noisiness in this passage. And he has only so many tools at his disposal. Like he's pretty much doing that with.
Speaker: repetition, the colon, the dash and italics. you know yeah i quite mean And so at certain points he describes the sound like when he describes it as like a muffled watch. And so you can start to think about what he must be talking about. Right. Yeah. He's like throwing all of the kind of linguistic and grammatical things at it. Right. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Earlier in the story, he talks about listening to the death watches in the wall, which I think refers to death watch beetles that click, you know, and that live in the walls of houses. So I think he's he's he's sort of preparing you at that moment to wonder what the sound could be. And most readers read it as his own heart. And yet it's also possible that it's completely a hallucination. it's also possible, weirdly enough, that it's these death watch beetles. Right.
Speaker: you know the um The sound is sort of meant to be itself in question. like and And that's how sensation, even ordinary sensation, can sometimes be, that you don't quite know when did it come above the threshold of awareness. will you Do other people hear it? No, that's fascinating.
Speaker: It was a low, dull, quick sound, much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. Like that's such a different sentence from the ones we've had previously, right? It suddenly gets super poetic here or super, i don't know, that kind of very rich language. He's using sibilance and like lots of...
Speaker: thick sound it's all in italics like I find it such an interesting little kind of interruption this moment where he's almost trying to I'm really trying to get this sound quite accurate for you right now yeah but much such a sound as a watch makes it's such a great uh bit of syntax Yeah, and I think that's meant to be, too, the moment of the reveal when you should, if you're an attentive reader, you should know it's a heart. Because he also heard the heart when he was preparing to kill the old man. yeah And Poe likes to put in these riddles, you know, where you you're not just at some point...
Speaker: told it's a heart and that's the reveal. yeah There's a pre-reveal where if you're really paying attention, you can get it. so I think that's part of what's being marked with the the slowing down of the language and and really the much more detailed description of what the sound is, not to mention italics, which Poe loves and perhaps you know may may slightly overuse at times. so it's some It's one of the reasons I used italics to represent his quotations in my book because italics are a very Poe thing to do. yeah But but so that's that's an important fulcrum of the passage where you should see. But if you don't, you'll get at the very end, you're you're going to fully be brought up to speed.
Speaker: Yeah, the low, dull, quick, like low, dull and quick are just, yeah, even those are kind of interesting sound wise, right? Like low, dull, quick. Quick is such a different, brighter sounding word. um But also the enveloped in cotton,
Speaker: I think enveloping cotton is such an interesting word for someone who is so like invested in the plantation south, shall we say, or ideas of Virginia and southern-ness.
Speaker: I don't know. like co like Yes, it could just be an easy image, but... you know Throughout his work, he's interested in figures of whiteness and blackness and the swamp and the kind of unknown. It's just interesting that cotton just emerges there in this 1850s moment.
Speaker: And I don't know whether you would do anything with that. But to me, side story, my first two books are about literatures of the US South. So I'm very invested in Southern dignifiers. And I just wondered whether whether you ever did see anything in that or not.
Speaker: you know I don't myself. i think one of the things that is strange about Poe for us is that he I don't think that he had too much of a guilty conscience about slavery. He was very committed to slavery. And in fact, you know in many ways, the the great wound of his life was was getting kicked out of the planter class because he was disinherited by his foster father. So I don't know. you know i think some of our reading techniques rely on the idea that the author is haunted by the guilt of slavery.
Speaker: i think Poe was haunted by the guilt of something, but I don't see in the in the biographical record that much evidence that it was slavery. In fact, chillingly to the contrary, he seems to have, as he seems easy in his mind about it. And he seems, if anything,
Speaker: the injustice that really weighs on him is that he, Edgar Allan Poe, did not inherit the hundreds of people who his father, foster father owned. yeah um That strikes him as a real injustice. So i i don't I don't know what to make of moments like that. you know I think there are writers of this period, such as, for example, Herman Melville, yeah where we can really see the writer chewing on the burden yeah of whiteness being haunted by the way that enslaved people are treated. So it's not that I don't think that that reading technique has a very central place for this period. But I think that for Poe, it may be peculiarly unsuitable because of his own, in a way, much more damning lack of apparent turmoil. I mean, other people have read him differently. I may be in the minority and seeing it this way, but that's how it looks to me.
Speaker: Yeah, no, it's interesting. Now, if I ever teach The Fall of the House of Usher, I find it really hard not to teach it as a story of like the white plantation class, right? And the kind of the rupturing of the white familial line and, you know, keeping racial purity and the the swampiness and all that kind of stuff But it's just always interesting when those images of, I don't the cotton, the whiteness of the cotton in this kind of very dark story, right? Which is kind of connected to the paleness. I don't know. Yeah, was just, I'm interested in your thoughts. This is fascinating to me. Yeah. I don't think noticed it most of the times I read it, which is what happens when I do these episodes, by the way. I'm like, I think we'll talk about this passage. And then I go back to an hour before. i like, wait.
Speaker: Well, it's interesting when something like that jumps out at a person. And I mean, I think that's part of what it means to talk about a writer's legacy, that it you know there are different ways of inheriting Poe and thinking about him. And so this is one way to think about him. And and one could say,
Speaker: regardless of whether hoe himself is thinking in those terms, we're certainly free to think in those terms. um And so i i'm I'm in favor of that. I don't think everything has to be referred back in the end, the biographical writer, certainly not.
Speaker: In this case, I guess, you know, I might myself see it that way, but yeah i I see what you're so what you're saying. And i I really celebrate this possibility in close reading that we can we can follow these insights and see where they take us in whatever context we think is most appropriate for for the text to that reading.
Speaker: Yeah, and I guess that's one of the the joys of actually of Darkness Becomes Bright is like how you kind of trace all the way these different people are like picking up Poe and like doing stuff with him, like what it what he's registering for them in a way. Yeah. You know, ah wow very different writers in very different context in time who are obsessed with what Poe is doing, but for very different reasons. That's kind of one of the joys of the book, actually, is kind of seeing how an author that we think we know, i suppose, can be read so differently and multiply over time.
Speaker: Thank you. Yeah, that that was really a big part of the joy of writing it. And I think it's a good way to think about what literature means for us. I mean, we we sometimes... rack our brains to figure out literature's instrumental function. But if you just look at, you know, not what should it mean or what can one make it mean, but what simply has it meant, you you see that people live their lives according to the relationships they have with the books that matter to them. Not everybody, of course, but ah a meaningful subset of human beings live this way. And it's inherently meaningful because they do so.
Speaker: Yeah. And yeah, I'm hoping this also this conversation about this extract helps people return to the story where I think it's like so known in a way or so read. But actually, when you return it, you're like, oh, this is way weirder than I remember. and he's doing just like interesting, fun things with it. You know, it's not just a story of like guilt, but as you say about like, can I trust what I'm experiencing in myself?
Speaker: You know, I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides as if excited to fury by the observations of the men. Even though like as if excited by fury to fury by the observations of the men. oh God, what could I do? i foamed, I raved, I swore. What could I do?
Speaker: you know, he's almost like, this isn't me doing anymore, right? Like I was pushed into this. I've been like forced into being this raving madman by these two men who were just looking at me. Yeah, it's it's it really is uncanny. And you see echoes of like, or you see, I guess, whatever the word, you see how Kafka eventually uncannily echoes this this kind of strange relationship between the official and the man pegged by the law, Dostoevsky too. you know I don't know that there's any connection as far as influence in either of those cases. I don't i don't know about that. But this basic setup of being plagued by official men is it's part of what makes the story seem so modern, because that's going to really become an important scene that literature wants to register, not only for criminals, but for people turned into insects and just for people caught up.
Speaker: in the cogs of bureaucracy. it's It's a little early for that in 1843 America, and yet Poe is nonetheless, I think, picking up on some of the first inklings of that modern situation or predicament.
Speaker: Yeah. And you know as you say, like he's writing Dupin as well, right? he's He's creating his own detective. So the idea of like finding out is in his mind anyway, right? The idea of this innate desire to find things out.
Speaker: But actually the finding out in this story, you know, that he reveals himself, you're like, no, like part of you doesn't want him to reveal this to the police officers, right? It is the being of his hideous heart. And i'm like, no, you almost got away with it. And I'm like, wait, yeah how has Poe got me into the place where I'm defending the murderer? It's true. Yeah, it's true. He does get you to that place. He really, he's that he really with his first person um criminal narrators, he he really does a good job of involving you or making you feel like you're that's the human side of things is the the guilty one. Yeah.
Speaker: And like, was it possible they heard not? Almighty God, no, no. They heard, they suspected, they knew, they were making a mockery of my horror. Like that I love, right? They heard, they suspected, they knew. Like he's he's almost even dramatizing their thinking, right? yeah From like yeah the experience to knowing.
Speaker: Like, yeah, the question of knowledge like runs through his work as well. Like, how do we know things? What do we know? What is the way we know it? Right. That's central to, it I guess, detective fiction as well. But that sense of can we know, do we know, what do we, how do we know it?
Speaker: Like here. Yeah, that seems to run through lots of his work in an interesting way. That's true. Yeah, he called the detective stories tales of ratiocination, which is is this kind of idiosyncratic word for reasoning. And so they really are about knowledge. um and And here in this scene, it's it's about how much you can know about other minds, too. I mean, that's a great philosophical problem that he's raising here.
Speaker: They heard, they suspected, they knew. Well, you know, maybe he's right about that or maybe he's not. and And maybe he became right about it, but only because he started raving and throwing chairs around, you know, and up to a certain point, they didn't know anything. And so it's maybe one of the most insoluble problems of knowledge that we have, like how much can we know about what other people are feeling or suffering? Yeah. And that's really central to the stories of confession, not only because here, if he confesses, then he'll hang. And so it has a ah sort of real world importance, if you will, but also because that's what the stories of confession are about for us as readers. Can we know what it's like to be a killer? Can we make sense of that as a human predicament? And Poe was really firmly on the side of us being able to make sense of that, of us being able to
Speaker: to understand what that would be like, that that there's actually ah an ordinariness to his situation, just as there's an ordinariness to the familiar chatting of the officers. He's simply in the ordinary predicament of not knowing how much he can get away with. I mean, you know, we've all been there, not necessarily with respect to such a grave crime.
Speaker: Yeah, I wonder, I mean, you know, your book is, your second book is On Not Knowing, right? Where you really patiently take us through what it might mean to not know, never know, give up on the idea of knowing.
Speaker: Like, you know, the question of epistemology runs through your work too, but sometimes in a counter direction. wonder how you yeah how you experienced this kind of strain of Poe. Yeah, I mean, for me, the the kind of on not knowing that was interesting to me in my last book was like, if you are a scholar trained in or attached to a particular sort of stance of,
Speaker: knowing things before others or knowing the object better than it knows itself. What does it look like to try to exercise the opposite muscle? And psychoanalysis was really useful to me in this respect, especially the the British middle group, Winnicott and others, because this is this is a problem that they very directly thought about and theorized that here we are, we have we've done we've done all this study and all this theoretical work, but at the end of the day, we're going to be in the room with one other person and we need to not ruin everything by by kind of showing off what we know. And I think that that problem comes up with literature too. So I don't necessarily know how to connect my own questions about knowing to Poe's, but I do think that in the way that I wanted to approach Poe as a critic, there's a connection and that I didn't want to adopt... a position of being the person outside of these dynamics of attachment with Poe, who was going to explain those dynamics of attachment to others. I wanted to show myself to be inside them, which is part of why the book has memoir elements. It's in part a kind of meant to be a kind of gesture of humility, although that's not always how autobiography is taken. but The gesture is, you know, I'm in the same circuits of attachment of not knowing what i project onto de Poe and what I take from him. And so the book is written in an attempt to keep some of the unknowing alive in one's affiliation with literature, even though I try to be really careful to get questions of scholarship right and and yeah and to benefit from all that.
Speaker: The many great scholars of Poe before me have taught us about him. Nonetheless, I want to try to keep the position of a fan too. and so Yeah. Yeah. a Different kind of knowing, right. Not knowing as explanation or kind of a totalizing. This is what this story is and how this person read him. But I like that phrase circuits of attachment. That definitely makes me think of Winnicott. But yeah, that um is very interesting in like coming to a text and kind of giving over to it. Right. Like going where it might take you. And as, i as we said earlier like seeing a new thing today that I didn't see yesterday.
Speaker: and being like oh where's where's that come from what is that doing to me today ah you can't fully grasp that's okay and i just very briefly like i loved the the very end right like terrible planks here here it is the beating of his hideous heart like that here here is also a kind of it feels to me like a kind of a gesture from poe right like you've got it now you know it's almost to us reader but also just then the story ends right like It's not here is the beam his heart. And then there's the aftermath. Like we kind of know the aftermath, I suppose. But it's it's great that he kind of just like stops right there.
Speaker: her Yeah, there's very little talk of anything that follows confession info. Once the confession happens, it's pretty much mic drop. Yeah. And and that's that's consistent across the confession stories. And I think to me that shows that to some extent they're less about crime or punishment than they are about the moment of confession itself. And what are we trying to do when we confess?
Speaker: We want to be heard. we want to be seen as what we are, which includes something horrible, which we don't want to be seen as. So it's a sort of moment of um conflicting desires that you you watch his narrators try to sort out.
Speaker: Yeah. Again, very psychoanalytic, right? Like the the simultaneous desire and not and desire not at the same time, right? that yeah That super interesting tension. We talked a little bit there about you kind of inserting yourself into the writing. i want to ask you about how you write, although the three books that we've kind of listed today, they're all quite different. So I'm imagining you don't have a one size fits all answer for this, but like, how did you, okay, how did you write Darkness Becomes Bright? Let's just stay focused on that one. What is your...
Speaker: what What was your setup? Did you sit at the computer at the same time every day? did you write by hand? what was How did you approach it? Yeah, i I sit at the computer at the same time every day. That's how I've always done it. And that time is the morning, you know, and sometimes it goes into the afternoon.
Speaker: But yeah, i'm I'm very much a daily writer. i use Scrivener, so that's become really important to my process. And part of, some people probably know this program, but part of what Scrivener allows is that you can write chunks and then rearrange them. And that's important to my process too, because I i sometimes don't know where something goes yet as I'm writing it. And I like to weave different narratives together. So Scrivener is useful for that.
Speaker: Did you, with the, on not knowing, they were kind of shorter essays, right? They began as essays that you were publishing with mine, right? That then came into the book. Like that, so it doesn't matter what you're writing. You kind of still just sit in front of the, in front of you. Yeah. Yeah, I do.
Speaker: That consistency. That is good. Yeah. now I don't know. I mean, I occasionally take the computer to a coffee shop or something, but basically I i wake up in the morning and and sit at the computer and write. I don't, my handwriting,
Speaker: is I would like to be somebody who could handwrite, but it's too hard. My hand gets stiff. You know, I can type really fast. I can't handwrite very fast. So yeah yeah, it's all computer for me. And you're not setting like amounts of writing. You're just going to write until you... I do. i I set word amounts. I keep an Excel spreadsheet where I keep track of how much I write. Less with the idea that I have to do a certain amount than that. I like to be able to look at my spreadsheet and say like,
Speaker: oh, it may feel like you're not getting anywhere, look at these words, you know? yeah So that's helpful to me as just almost like a kind of biofeedback, like, oh, writing occurred. Don't worry. It's going to be okay. You just keep showing up to it. Yeah. um So I do that. Yeah. I like that. Writing occurred. Yeah, that's it's good to know that. Sometimes it doesn't feel like it did, you know, so you have to have some evidence that it occurred. Agreed.
Speaker: Were you always a writer or, you know, did you come to books early? Did you come to writing early in your life? Yeah, I think my first publication was a poem about sharks in the in the local paper when I was in second grade. So um yeah, it's sort of been ever since then. I've been a writer in one way or another. Yeah, I was on the school paper and then i then I was a poet for a while in college and then went to graduate school and was a literary critic and have continued to be a literary critic in different ways ever since.
Speaker: Does anyone still have this shark poem? Does it still exist? yeah, it's somewhere. I mean, i i don't i don't remember it. You know i don't have it memorized or anything, but it exists. It definitely exists. Yeah. I love that. I was very, very, very proud of it at the time. um You know, looking back, it leaves something to be desired, know,
Speaker: But I was very proud of it at the time. I love that. And you said you used to write poetry. You stopped for particular reason? I don't write poems anymore. just became an essay writer instead.
Speaker: I don't know. That just sort of that happened. But I do feel like certain aspects of my training as a poet still affect the way I write essays and the way I hear language. And, you know, I put things together kind of like poets put them together where you have a whole bunch of poems and you...
Speaker: figure out their order. i put together kind of that way still. So yeah, it has their ghosts of it that are still in my practice today. Yeah, I especially the essays in on not knowing, you know, from line to line, sometimes you're moving kind of in different directions. You're like, Oh, I'm not entirely sure how that line relates to the previous one. But I'm just going to yeah go with it in a way that a poet might juxtapose images together. Right? Yeah, I think that's true.
Speaker: Yeah, I reread the first one has catch a minnow earlier. Yeah, just beautiful. You're talking about the minnows in the water, right? And you say, they have lateral line organs that permit them to feel as a kind of matrix, the motions of others in the water. They are gone so fast is as if they're leaving cause my fingers to touch the river and not the other way around. Like that's prose, but it kind of poetry, right? Like, Oh, thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah, I i think in images a lot. And so, yeah, there are aspects of it that, and I i think the sound, i I think many prose writers are like this, but the sound matters to me.
Speaker: There's a whole realm of poetry prose overlap more than we think. So not only prose poetry, but poets who write books that are you know, kind of treated as novels. And yet you can see how they could have also been called prose poems. So there's a whole area like that, that at least in my reading matters a lot to me. I spend a lot of time in that zone.
Speaker: Yeah, well, it definitely shows anyway. So readers, there's too many recommendations already. for that You need to go back and read Poe. You need to read both of Emily's books. Oh, thank you. Lots lots to catch up on.
Speaker: The final question I ask everyone is, what books do you want to recommend today? They could be old things. They could be new things, things not yet out. Anything you like. Well, I've been reading um Crime and Punishment recently, actually, which is an interesting pairing with Poe because, you know, Crime and Punishment is like a 500-page-odd version of what Poe does in two or three pages here. And so it makes a good pairing, could make a good Halloween episode in 2027. So, know, I can think about that. um But in terms of what, ah like, the...
Speaker: essay genre that I was just talking about, like kind of poets' essays. I have a few favorites there um that I'll mention. One is Amy Leach's Things That Are, which I don't know how how commonly known. I see you nodding. That makes me happy. Yeah, it was definitely published over here. It's a great, yeah great, strange book.
Speaker: And i I imagine a lot of people also know, but some might not, and they're very lucky if they get to read it for the first time. Brian Blanchfield's Proxies, which is a great book of essays by a poet. I don't know if it was published over there or not. It was published by Nightboat here, but I'm sure it's gettable and it's it's an incredible book of essays.
Speaker: I don't know. Over time, I've become so attached to the essay. But funny, over here, like books of essays are really hard to sell. Publishers don't want to sell books of essays, which is strange, right? They'll sell American books that are already books of essays that have work a publisher. But like if you pitch like a book, that they're like no, we need it to be like,
Speaker: narrative nonfiction or memoir or something. Whereas the idea individual essays, I'm like, I wonder what, why there's a stronger tradition of that in the US, I guess, than here. But it's always interesting to me that when you look like a book of essays, usually they're from the US or or from somewhere else. and That's interesting. Yeah. yeah I mean, i don't know. i i think I've heard the same thing that publishers in the US too, maybe it's not to the same extent that they're unwilling to publish books of essays or individual essays.
Speaker: But it's my favorite kind of thing to read for the most part. So I'm always happy when somebody breaks the mold. And I was really lucky to that I'm Not Knowing was published by Peninsula Press in the UK. And they do they do great stuff with the essay. So they're fighting the good fight there. Yeah, there are definitely some smaller presses. I'm just always interested. I'm like, this is such a beautiful genre. Like you can just dip into it. You can read one. right it's like put it aside for a little while and go back to the next day. i don't know. More essays in the world, please. Yeah.
Speaker: They're harder to describe. I mean, if you imagine like having the job of selling books and wanting to be able to say, what is this book about? you know Really, almost any book of essays that I care about, I can kind of imagine a cartoon character version of myself with like a little thought bubble and an asterisk in it trying to describe an essay that book. They're just very difficult to summarize. So maybe it has something to do with that. Yeah. But I'm just kind of like, I don't know what it's about. go read it. Just... Just take it and read it. You must need to read it. You know, it's maybe not a marketing strategy for the ages. So yeah, maybe that's part of it.
Speaker: Maybe that's why I'm not a book publicist. I'll just talk about books in here. i know. i don't I don't have the skill either in that. but um But yeah, I mean, books of essay essays are great. And it's always, it's always I mean, they they provide a kind of company that's really special, I think.
Speaker: Yeah. and That thinking aloud. And thank you. Yeah, i was trying to do a segue then, but I was going to say thank you for thinking aloud me today about Poe. This has been really exciting and a really nice opportunity to go back to his work. And yeah. Well, thank you. It's been a real joy.
Speaker: Oh, good. Darkness Becomes Bright is a great, great book. So readable. i like flew through it. So everybody get it. It's out now in the UK and the US. So you can now go get it. Thank you.
Speaker: Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to this episode. If you want more like it, just go back to episode 18, where i talk to Clio Frank about Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Speaker: It's a great pairing with this episode. Please subscribe to the show if you haven't already. Please leave a review on any of the platforms you're listening to Just subscribe, click five stars. If you do that today, you'll make me very happy.
Speaker: It was my birthday this week, so it's a nice little present for me, as well as a Halloween gift to the world. Follow the show and me on Instagram, tag me in any posts of episodes that you like. You can also get more information by subscribing to the Substack. This show was made possible by an Impact Accelerator Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the University of Hertfordshire.
