“As from the other side of the mirror / he gave himself up alone to his complex / destiny as the inventor of nightmares” (‘The other, the same’) say these lines of the poem that Borges dedicated to Edgar Allan Poe knowing that the genius of Boston Far from being part of the romanticism fostered by the mythical notion of inspiration, he is a figure of obvious anachronism because his aesthetic ideas do not correspond to those of the time in which he lived, and he belongs to the lineage of artists who have been forced to to build a literary world, to reveal the keys that contribute to interpreting it and to erect a scaffolding that supports his poetics, and Poe’s is analytical, based on logic and details, the result of a scientism that somehow predicts some of the presuppositions of the naturalistic narrative in which the emotions always reach the reader sifted by the distance imposed by the narrator, and it doesn’t matter if he narrates in the third person or in the first person.
Poe believed in meticulous planning: “No point in the composition can be attributed to intuition or chance”
It was Poe who assured that it is essential to have a plan in order not to stray from the path, and that the writer who lets himself be carried away by inspiration, induced or not by artificial paradises, wanders inevitably. Let each paragraph pay homage to the final text. And it is ‘Philosophy of composition’, a brief plea to the detriment of the muses collected in the first volume of the complete essays, the text in which he consigns these convictions from the obstinacy in obeying a modus operandi, convinced that “no point in the composition can be attributed to intuition or chance; and that it advanced towards its completion, step by step, with the same exactitude and rigorous logic proper to a mathematical problem”. Valéry knew how to see through the idolatry of Baudelaire by the author of The fall of the House of Usher that Poe is “the demon of lucidity, the genius of analysis and the inventor of the most seductive combinations of logic with imagination, of mysticism with calculation.” And Neruda refers to Poe’s “mathematical darkness” in his famous poem of General sing. Chance does not contribute, nor does intuition, to the invention of the archetype of the contemporary short story and symbolist poetry, certainly the discipline in the creative process and the discursive strategies learned in countless and profitable readings in which he attends to the stories but he dwells on the words chosen to relate them and on the way in which they are arranged with the precision of a goldsmith, contrary, he says, to most writers, “who prefer to make it clear that they compose under a kind of frenzy, an ecstatic intuition ”.
Along with the edition of the complete stories published by Páginas de Espuma in 2008, with a translation and prologue by Julio Cortázar and prefaces by Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa, and the volume of complete poetry translated and edited by José Francisco Ruiz Casanova (Cátedra, 2016), the Spanish reader now has the complete essays in three volumes that Páginas de Espuma began to publish in 2018, and the third of which we celebrate has just seen the light of day, so that you can access the vast universe of the author of The crimes of morgue Street. Let us hasten to say that these volumes could have been titled critical work because above all they gather reviews and because under this label the four studies on poetry that open the first volume also fit effortlessly, above all the essential and influential ‘Filosofía de la composición’, the erudite and highly technical ‘La lógica del verso’ , and a full-fledged poetic theory entitled ‘The poetic principle’ and in which it abounds in the idea that literary creation must avoid passion because it requires containment (“to impose a truth, we need severity before the efflorescence of language”).
In his essay on Daniel Defoe, turning to plausibility, he reproaches the reader for reading robinson crusoe “none of his thoughts are for Defoe, all for Robinson”, as if the success of a text was not the result of the artistic talent with which it was composed. He dedicates an ‘Exordium to critical reviews’ in which he defends literary criticism as a rigorous exercise that mitigates “frivolous opinion” as much as possible, and in ‘On critics and criticism’ he praises reading that interprets and points out defects and not the one that falls into hagiographies, but the one that “shows how the work could have been improved to contribute to the general cause of letters”, while speaking about the need to defend American literary talent beyond the hindrance of feeling like a British colony also in the literary field.
He inherits the Gothic of Potocki or Walpole and reads Coleridge with devotion, praises Hawthorne’s tales, but makes Fenimore Cooper’s English ugly.
From among his compatriots, he chooses authors who could constitute the canon of his national literature. He inherits the Gothic of Potocki or Walpole and reads Coleridge with devotion, praises Hawthorne’s tales, but disfigures Fenimore Cooper’s English. He presages Dickens’s success at 32 when English is 29. He debates about plagiarism and originality, and allows himself the luxury of writing a review of his own work, as Nabokov will do later. Let us note that Poe’s critical work not only contemplates hermeneutical difficulties or opens debates that portend comparativism, he attacks inappropriate verbal forms and scolds the author who misuses polysyndeton. It is not Poe who must be told that literature is language, a paradigmatic axis that crosses a syntagmatic axis, to choose and arrange on paper, knowing that “only one step stands between the sublime and the ridiculous.”
We observe a boiling mind, an artist who does not understand clairvoyance and outbursts and is forced to understand the mechanisms of art and perceive what linguistic decisions generate what effect, a genius who never believed in genius, a genuinely modern author who already knew how to see , before Pavese noticed it in the profession of living, that “the artist who does not continuously analyze his technique is a poor man”.
Edgar Allan Poe
Translation by Antonio Jimenez Morato
Foam Pages, 2023
480 pages. 35 euros
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