Yet he refused to rewrite history for the sake of American mythmaking and argued defiantly that national literature was a contradiction in terms. Convinced that “the world at large [is] the true audience of the author,” Poe continued to prefer foreign themes and crafted several late European tales—such as “The Cask of Amontillado”—dramatizing universal human passions.

Predicaments

In an 1838 satire (“How to Write a Blackwood Article”) Poe mocked the formula for sensation that he used in his own magazine writing. His fictional “Mr. Blackwood” advises an aspiring author: “Get yourself into such a scrape as no one ever got into before” and then “pay minute attention to the sensations.” In the sequel, a would-be writer, Psyche Zenobia, climbs a clock tower, gets her head stuck in a narrow opening, and suffers decapitation by the clock’s “scimitar-like minute-hand,” but in Poe’s farce this predicament poses no obstacle whatsoever to the narrator’s talking head, which prattles on about the plight of her headless torso. The plot carries to absurdity a premise crucial to Poe’s sensationalism: No subject rivets an audience more than impending death by natural force or human contrivance.

Repeatedly, Poe conjured different scenarios of annihilation, sometimes dramatizing the spectacle of death, sometimes allowing horrified victims a last-second reprieve. An early tale, “MS. Found in a Bottle,” prefigures Poe’s own emerging relationship to writing. Stranded on a phantom ship caught in an immense vortex, the narrator believes himself to be “hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge—some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction.” The manuscript in the bottle, the story itself, represents the deepest desire of writing: to bridge the abyss of mortality by imparting secret knowledge of what lies beyond.

In a later version of the whirlpool motif, “A Descent into the Maelström,” Poe endows his Norwegian fisherman with both dangerous forgetfulness—he fails to wind his watch and so miscalculates the onset of the vortex—and saving recollection of the scientific laws that preserve his life. But his brush with death has aged him and whitened his hair; he tells his tale, appropriately, from the brink of a cliff that may represent the edge of oblivion.

The predicament of Prince Prospero in “The Masque of the Red Death” stems from the vain belief that he can thwart death—and deny his own mortality—by walling out the contagion sweeping his country. By staging a masked ball for the privileged few while the plague ravages the common folk, the prince reveals his arrogance and inhumanity. The appearance of a stranger disguised as a bloody corpse, however, signals Prospero’s inevitable fate.

Evoking the Spanish Inquisition, “The Pit and the Pendulum” presents a plethora of torments. The narrator initially supposes himself buried alive but then confronts in succession a pit, a blade-sharp pendulum, and converging, red-hot walls. Poe’s opening line alludes to a “sickness unto death” that suffuses the narrative, producing a meditation on the “long agony” of dread. Throughout, the narrator observes his own sensations as closely as he does the devices of his executioners. The contrived ending explains the survival of the narrator and hence the tale itself.

Poe exploits a widespread anxiety in “The Premature Burial,” introducing his first-person narrative with apparently factual instances of living inhumation. Embalming had not yet become common, and epidemics necessitated hasty interments. In the year Poe’s tale appeared, an inventor exhibited a “life-preserving coffin” equipped with a bell. The narrator, fearful of being buried alive, awakens to find himself apparently entombed. But here Poe turns the story back upon the reader, subverting sensation by revealing the “burial” to be a case of premature panic.

In “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” Poe brilliantly explores the predicament of arrested mortality, as an experiment in mesmerism leaves the tubercular Valdemar suspended on the verge of death. The symptoms of his protracted death-in-life horrify even the medical figures who attend him. When the narrator finally breaks the hypnotic spell, the sufferer responds in a way that no reader of this tale ever forgets.

MS. FOUND IN A BOTTLE

Qui n’a plus qu’un moment à vivre
N’a plus rien à dissimuler.

—QUINAULT—ATYS.1

Of my country and of my family I have little to say. Ill usage and length of years have driven me from the one, and estranged me from the other. Hereditary wealth afforded me an education of no common order, and a contemplative turn of mind enabled me to methodise the stores which early study very diligently garnered up. Beyond all things, the works of the German moralists gave me great delight; not from any ill-advised admiration of their eloquent madness, but from the ease with which my habits of rigid thought enabled me to detect their falsities. I have often been reproached with the aridity of my genius; a deficiency of imagination has been imputed to me as a crime; and the Pyrrhonism2 of my opinions has at all times rendered me notorious. Indeed, a strong relish for physical philosophy has, I fear, tinctured my mind with a very common error of this age—I mean the habit of referring occurrences, even the least susceptible of such reference, to the principles of that science. Upon the whole, no person could be less liable than myself to be led away from the severe precincts of truth by the ignes fatui of superstition. I have thought proper to premise thus much, lest the incredible tale I have to tell should be considered rather the raving of a crude imagination, than the positive experience of a mind to which the reveries of fancy have been a dead letter and a nullity.

After many years spent in foreign travel, I sailed in the year 18—, from the port of Batavia, in the rich and populous island of Java, on a voyage to the Archipelago of the Sunda islands.