Poe - The Black Cat
So, surprising nobody, the Poe story is a Gothic horror, full of the uncanny and emotions in extremis. Following on our [in the Discord's] talk about Frankenstein, I grateful that it was only peppered with them rather than basted, which in a condensed short story was just the right amount to give it the necessary flavor.
That said, supernatural thrill by and large leaves me cold, so while I can objectively comment on these aspects it doesn't really tug on anything in me in a way that I find compelling. The comparison that comes to mind is with The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I could veritably feel the London fog leaking out of the pages and I have an immense respect for both what Stevenson achieves in a literary sense as well as his thematic core - that after having read several Stevenson books I can see in him a real tug-of-war between what he sees as proper, civilized behavior and a kind of independent, masculine vitality that is being smothered by it. The part that's really lost when most people talk about that book is that Jekyll without Hyde is really quite milquetoast, and that while the latter is abominable he nonetheless contains that part of Jekyll which is effective and even virile. It's worth much more than the simple good/bad parts of humanity that it gets portrayed as.
Which returning to The Black Cat, it has a core in PERVERSITY. That word is even specially bolded when it shows up, such that we can't miss what is on Poe's mind. That this man is acting in a way contrary to what he knows is good; intentionally acting in that way precisely because he knows it is contrary. That's the rub, that PERVERSITY is a real human phenomenon, and that it is little accounted for by any rational explanation of human nature. This is really quite worth something, and definitely worth even more in the time it appeared. But where Poe then loses me is the connection to the supernatural.
In this story, there is a fundamental link between the PERVERSITY of man and the eerie vengeance of spiritual nature. It's hard to put a finger on exactly how, but it's a uniting of the sense that there are irrational depths to both humanity and the world, and that the expression of one elicits the action of the other. If the man had acted rationally nothing would have happened to him, but because he somehow broke through the membrane of his own little rational mind he also broke through the thin barrier between this world and another that lies adjacent, and it took great pleasure in punishing his PERVERSITY for going against the order of things.
Which all this is very interesting, and again from a literary standpoint impressive... but for me it also has little take-home. The one psychological observation sits like a lone jewel amidst what otherwise feels like a heap of macabre props.
Gogol - The Overcoat
This one I'm still pondering, and apparently just must read Nabokov's essay on. But before I gain more opinions from others I do like to try and form my own from what I can see.
The first and foremost is that I don't quite know what Gogol's view is. If I didn't know any better, I'd think he was like some proto-Dickens with this tale, enumerating the woes of the lower class with one of its longsuffering members in this heedless urban society. But... it doesn't have the right flavor for that. Dickens' poor people are too often blandly virtuous but Akaky here is... just pathetic. He's longsuffering, but he's so small minded that his simple joy in copying comes in part from his inability to do anything else, his simple joy in an overcoat coming from his inability to conceive of anything else. To celebrate the small comforts can be a kind of peasant virtue, but Akaky venerates it; it is raised to such a level that it passes beyond our admiration to concern. He's a half-dysfunctional little creature that was named on accident.
Which is what left me puzzling, because the plot is so predictable by today's standards (what, he lost his prized overcoat?!? No way!) that all I could think on was what it was Gogol was doing. The small biography included by the editors noted that Gogol was critical of society but wasn't really writing to change things as a social crusader. That he eventually became a religious fanatic and died under his own self-inflicted privation adds fuel to the sense that whatever Gogol was, he wasn't your usual secular-minded do-gooder. Is it just pure sensitivity to suffering in these meaningless ways?
Which brings me to Russian supernaturalism. It left me a little bemused in The Queen of Spades and the the result is the same here too. This means something to the Russians, a ghost that is far more than a Western ectoplasm, but a corporeal being revenging itself; underneath Russian Orthodoxy, it's as though death is still held in the primitive view, not as ascendance but a continuation where the worst in spirits, rather than their best, comes out. Akaky in life would never have ripped a coat from somebody else, yet his poltergeist does so with hideous satisfaction. And the introduction at the end of another ghost gives the sense that the Russian world is full of these things; perhaps full of poor Akakys who have been destroyed by this world, but apparently full of another superstitious level that is at all times exerting a great impact. There is undoubtedly something here to get about the Russian mind.
So with that, I remain in a state of suspended judgement. I know The Overcoat is important (I wish I didn't; I hate altering judgements knowing something is important), and that I've got at least one Nabokov essay to read on it before I even attempt to close the book, but that's where it stands.
A reply from somebody:
Ooooh. I'll just check again if I've read this particular Gogol.
And I very much enjoyed reading Black Cat, but I immediately knew before even reading your thoughts that it wouldn't be to your taste. :) The perversity theme is really just Poe himself, he can't help it.
Roald Dahl compares favourably to Poe, I think, as a purveyor of the macabre.
He's perverse as well, but has a surprising breadth of interest and imagination.
Not having read much Poe, it in some way reminds me of Van Gogh. As one fellow artist (I forget which) said on seeing one his paintings: "You, sir, are insane." Not in the literal sense, but in a profound maladjustment to this life. That he was also a remarkable artist (although he aspired to be a preacher first, in inverse of Gogol) then completes the tale. The narrative people love is that genius and insanity are close to each other, and that there is something somehow exalted yet spooky about somebody who is "plumbing the depths of the mind" to bring us this art. But I don't think this is correct in how they relate to each other. Neuroticism can certainly support the artistic temperament (as well as the religious, I might again add), but it isn't a pre-requisite, and I'm not at all convinced that it is necessarily more profound.
As such, when I look at a Van Gogh, with its eerie discoloration of reality that turns our view uneasily inward to his state of mind, there is a genius in his ability to convey but I'm not sure a genius in what he is conveying. This is how I'm feeling about Poe, although again with admittedly fewer data points to compare. Compulsive drinker and gambler, dissolute, marries his 14 year old cousin only to have her die young due to the impoverishment he subjected her to, and then passes away shortly later himself. None of this militates against being a great artist, or even having great insights (thinking of Dostoyevsky here), but I also have a hard time romanticizing this kind of a life and the perspective it led him to.
So yes, to observe that PERVERSITY is a thing is a piece of psychology worth noting, especially for anybody who would be overzealous in reducing us to rational or evolutionary or any other simplified axioms. Humans are just a bit odder than that. But the resonance it has with the everything else, the exaltation of extreme emotion, even negative ones, as insight in itself, is something I do just reject.
[Addendum: read the Nabokov essay on The Overcoat, but not feeling enlightened by it unfortunately. Mostly just reminded of how insufferable I find him.]
Reply again:
Agreed. I think the popular notion of insanity being inextricably linked to creativity is fallacious; in Russia's golden period you had madmen like Gogol and Dosoyevsky but also paragons of sanity like Chekhov. But what is true is that morbidity does seem to support a worldview conducive to art of a particular kind.
I wouldn't put Gogol and Dostoevsky into the same category of 'madmen'.
But that aside, what I think a dose of neuroticism supports is the quest for meaning. The basic search, philosophical, moral, or religious, starts when something is not right with the world; something doesn't fit, like a dislocated shoulder, and the continual pain drives the need to put it back in its place. The problem to me seems that being completely smothered in anxious, paranoid fear, or superstitious mania, or total dissociation from one's surroundings and body, tends to prevent proper progress either.
Take Gogol. Going by The Overcoat, and Nabokov's analysis of it, it's absurd. But it's absurd in a very particular way, one in which there is a sense that there is only a thin skein of rationality overlaying a malicious irrational nothingness. In his later life he snaps into religious extremism, begins styling himself as the mouthpiece of Jesus Christ, and fasts himself into unwellness and death. Clearly he had more than "a dose" of neuroticism; he was completely steeped in what we would regard as mental illness, his "breaking through" to another state of mind only being commemorated because of his supreme artistic ability to share it. The actual mental life he experienced is not one I think anybody actually wants, except in idle-ignorant moments thinking it would so very romantic to have a life so, erm, vivid.
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