Many titles can be given to Edgar Allan Poe: “King of Terrors Before the King”, “Lord of Cryptograms”, “The Wheel of Nevermore” (“Never again” / “never again” is the answer that the lyrical hero repeatedly receives from the raven in the author’s poem of the same name. – socialbites.ca) – makes room for imagination.
It was and is still being read, it has been filmed (even in the form of theatrical productions) – and, moreover, it is still being filmed by industry giants like Netflix. Why did this strange man, the son of traveling artists and the muse of his 13-year-old cousin’s husband, Arthur Conan Doyle, fascinate the public so much?
You must understand what the secret of your texts is. It’s a code. And if Poe, the great lover of secrets, boasted that there was no riddle too ingenious for him to solve – he even held a contest for newspaper readers – then there is a more difficult task for those of us who are not so experienced in cryptography. ahead of us. Solve the code of immortality in the texts of Edgar Allan Poe.
There are only two keys, they are on the surface. This is detective work and mysticism.
Poe, however genius he was, did not invent these genres. One way or another, they have existed since the times of Gothic literature and not only excited the hearts of heroes who refused to accept the paranormal and mysterious aspects of life (as, for example, in Hoffmann’s “Devil’s Potions”), but also frayed the nerves of readers.
Have you ever wondered why TV channels and streaming services are still full of horror and crime movies: from film adaptations of Agatha Christie and Stephen King to the next “Insidious” and “Secrets of the Investigation”?
These genres play with our soul, penetrating the depths of our consciousness, where memories of old times spent around the fire, when everything around was dangerous, are still alive. Death awaits in the distant roar of wild predators, in a blinding flash of lightning. And this – first key. The mysticism that Poe managed to reach our inner world.
After all, from prophetic terror to spine-tingling fear, fear is as necessary to us as love, joy, and peace. Fear does not allow you to relax; It lubricates the slightly rusty gears of the old self-preservation mechanism. And in order not to experience this in everyday life, we found a suitable substitute for fear – books, films, audio series. We found Edgar Allan Poe. Reading this or watching its adaptations strengthens our soul, as if we were exercising on an exercise bike. After all, what is written is not true. We understand that at any moment we can close the book and return to a relaxed state.
So what is the key to deciphering our code, Poe’s immortality formula? The problem is that everything familiar and understandable is perceived by our consciousness as something safe, while everything strange and incomprehensible is perceived as unsafe and therefore scary.
What about Poe?
It is full of the same strange and incomprehensible images – so we fear its red-masked Death, its Heralds, its crows. All these are black colors that concentrate on the consciousness and surround it until you put the book down. The mind goes to sleep, gives birth to monsters, then dawn comes and everything gets weird – what if we see this again? – becomes familiar and understandable. It’s not scary. Like Goya: “Imagination without the use of reason produces hideous monsters; This, together with reason, is the mother of all arts and the miracles they create.”
Part of the puzzle has been solved. But the second one remained; detective. It also stabilizes our life and brings order to it. Any detective story – no matter how conceptually the author plays it up – is a story that satisfies our need for justice; The story of how the broken order was restored and everyone got what they deserved. This is a new legend.
After all, most of the legends about the creation of the world – cosmogonic myths – work according to the same scheme: instead of mustachioed researchers, there are heroic gods, instead of insidious lords of the underworld – lords of chaos who do not allow the world to balance. In the Greeks, Zeus defeats Kronos, in the Babylonians, Marduk kills Tiamat, in the Scandinavians, Odin, Vili and Ve destroy the giant Ymir, and the world living according to the laws of chaos comes into order.
Thus, detective stories become, as they say in professional circles, a stable genre. Otherwise – comfortable. Despite all the maniacs, bloody massacres and ghosts, the formula remains the same.
And here it is, Edgar Allan Poe, very happy that we have decoded it, stands up and nods: yes, everything is like that. I strengthened your consciousness by tormenting you with strange and frightening images. By coming up with codes and detective riddles, I have quenched your thirst for justice and brought you to your comfort zone.
However, there is another key to this secret: It opens the doors of eternity.
It is often stated that the author and his works are “immortal”. So how does immortality manifest itself? No, not like the endless text density in literature classes. The truth is that truly immortal texts percolate through the centuries, giving rise to more and more new images.
So Edgar Allan Poe suddenly appears on Turgenev, who is planning another prose poem, and whispers to him “Mask of the Red Death”, which suddenly turns into “Skulls”.
“And suddenly – as if by the illusion of a magic wand – a thin crust of skin fell off from all heads and all faces, and instantly the deathly whiteness of the skulls was revealed, the bare gums and cheekbones were covered with a bluish tint. tin.”
But that’s not even the point. The solution to all the secrets of “immortal” literature and the immortal Poe is this: Stories written in the distant past do not lose their power in modern environments. Therefore, 19th-century Evangelists can easily become 21st-century Evangelists without losing anything; or even purchasing.
Yes, this is due to the fashion for remakes and retellings – but not every text that suddenly finds itself in the events of a different era will be able to retain its strength and appeal. An endless text is not a collection of plots and characters. This is a set of shadows, individual qualities, images and human passions that imitate any time – they, like any shadow, are inseparable from a person.
Do you remember Hesse’s passage in Steppenwolf?
“And in our modern world there are also poetic works in which, under the guise of the play of faces and characters, an attempt is made, perhaps not quite consciously by the author, to portray the diversity of the soul.”
Edgar Alan Poe is like this; It forces us to look into the darkest corners of our souls so that we have time to fear and become stronger. No longer subject to the author’s control, these shadows, monsters of the mind, slip further and further through centuries and distances. They don’t change just like we don’t change. We are still interested in encountering them and recognizing our own distorted reflection in them.
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the position of the editors.