Two notes on craft from Poe

Or, perhaps, one note on convincing storytelling or believability from two different but overlapping angles.

Having read last year about Poe and science and a few weeks ago about Poe and American cities, right now I’m reading a pretty straightforward short biography called Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living, by Paul Collins. Despite its brisk pace and short length (107 pages), the book takes care to track Poe’s development as a craftsman—of poetry first, then fiction and journalism. Two early passages that caught my eye:

First, from a passage on Poe’s famously savage book reviews:

Poe could also lavish praise; indeed, his appreciations feature some of his most careful thinking about craft. In a generally positive review of Robert Bird’s satirical identity-shifting novel Sheppard Lee, Poe explained that a fantastical narrator must speak “as if the author were firmly impressed with the truth, yet astonished with the immensity of the wonders he relates, and for which, professedly, he neither claims nor anticipates credence.” The author must commit to his conceit, in other words—and yet must also perform a sleight of hand, and not overexplain or make the reader conscious of when the story has shifted into the improbable. Poe was, in fact, airing a central tenet of his own fiction: “The attention of the author, who does not depend upon explaining away his incredibilities, is directed to giving them the character and the luminousness of truth, and thus are brought about, unwittingly, some of the most vivid creations of human intellect. The reader, too, readily perceives and falls in with the writer’s humor, and suffers himself to be borne on thereby.”

Second, on one of the short stories that marks Poe’s maturity as a writer:

“Ligeia” returns to two of Poe’s signature themes—liminal states of life and death, and the fluidity of identity—and continues a brilliant use of gothic settings that were curiously old-fashioned even by 1838. Yet Poe does not jest with or even acknowledge these as fictional conventions . . . Instead, “Ligeia” was Poe’s first story to absolutely sustain the voice of the narrator and a belief in the conceit. He never breaks character—not to slip in an ostentatious scholarly joke, not for a sly nudge to the reader, not for grotesque description for its own sake. This disciplined internal logic would become a hallmark of Poe’s craft, and the defining characteristic of the stories that we still read today.

This latter is in contrast to some of Poe’s early stories, which were stylistically accomplished but inconsistent, narrated by nonentities or full of sly asides, wink-wink-nudge-nudge allusions, or showoffy jokes. They do not, in Collins’s words, commit fully to their conceits, and their narrators do not sustain the fevered, convincing voice Poe describes in the first passage because they step back from the dream they’ve created in the mind of the reader to gesture, comment on, or joke about it. The result is inconsistency and a lack of believability.

Consider the intensity of the Poe narrator par excellence, the anonymous narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” or even a more sane, ordinary character like Arthur Gordon Pym. Both describe outlandish, shocking events and horrible violence with a matter-of-factness that makes them instantly convincing, and Poe, master of tone and pacing, does not pull away or relax his narrators’ hold on the reader. Now compare these to any of the recent Marvel movies—an extreme and probably unfair comparison, but I’m sticking with it. Jokey, unserious, pandering, self-aware and self-deprecating, their drama and emotion diluted by a steady drip of flippancy, their stories are weak as a result.

In sum: in writing a story, commit totally to selling what’s happening as true, and don’t blink or flinch—even once.

To paraphrase Chesterton, who was himself well familiar with Poe, fiction is a game of chicken which no man of honor should decline.