In the days of the Wild West, when writers were busy writing about questions like, freedom, love, morality, Edgar Allan Poe was delving into the more mysterious aspects of life which touched upon the eerie, the grotesque, the occult and the arcane. The stories of Poe have an aura of the mysterious and Gothic about them. Some of the stories reminded me of Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’ The narrative vein of the tales is uncharacteristic and departs from the established modes of storytelling. Some of the stories have a plot; others are explorations or metaphysical enumerations on the power of the mind and the psyche, which I believe was certainly far ahead of the conventions of those early days of writing fiction. The murders in the Rue Morgue where Poe introduces the character of the modern detective Dupin, is a chilling and horrifying story. The seclusion of the victims and the absence of motive render a touch of the super natural to it. The Pit and the Pendulum narrates the various mechanisms of torture employed by the sect to tame the heretic. The tale has resounding religious symbols and reminded me of mediaeval inquisitions. The cruelty and the grotesqueness of the methods contrast with the abstraction and lucidity in the narrator’s mind towards his impending doom. Various stark details like the invasion of the rats give this story the feel of the vampire.
In the story about the facts in the case of M.Valdemar, the narrator tries to capture that unseizable moment that hangs between life and death. The decomposing of the body/corpse in a paroxysm of conversation from the other world, casts a doubt over the veracity of the tale but nevertheless leaves the reader bound to a feeling of awe, disbelief, stupor and alienation. In the story ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ which is one of his more well-known stories, Poe’s narrative of the degradation, sickness and decadence that has stricken an illustrious family, is chilling mainly because of the solitude and alienation of the characters he is able to establish. His sister Madelaine, whom Mr. Usher buries alive in the crypt, returns to take her half lunatic brother along with her to the grave. In other stories like the Black Cat, The Cask of Amontillado, Poe establishes that the seed of the sinister, the evil, is present in a diseased mind. In Ligeia he hints at the presence of the fantastic that divides the mortal and the immortal. In the story The Gold Bug, Poe introduces the concepts of codes and cryptography perhaps for the first time in literary fiction. In Poe’s stories, the events are caused more by spiritual, para psychological factors than mere circumstances. Poe’s style borders on the super-natural exploring the eccentricities in thought and behavior. Modern mystery, horror, detective tales, all have a root somewhere in the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. ( To be continued)