The Cask of Amontillado is on my mind at the moment. I love the short story form. It’s easy to read during coffee breaks and cigarette breaks, mental breaks. It’s fun to tie thematically to other short stories. Poe summarized the short story as such, and I quote: “It is the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder of literary fiction. Tasty if fresh. Pretty cheap to produce. And generally satisfying, though leaving one dangerously prone to stomach rumblings several hours later. Would order again. 10/10.” True quote. He was a weird guy. Prescient.
The truth is, I was looking through old essays for one discussing the nature of The Misfit in Flannery O’Connor’s masterpiece. A short story ranking alongside the best of any Faulkner, or Poe, of any contemporary, predecessor, or protege, O’Connor’s story deals with the most darkly beautiful concept – death – in the most whimsical, succinct, colorful way.
But that’s not what I found in searching through my stacks. I found the essay of a previous me (nineteenish years ago, to be preciseish). And thus this diatribe’s nature shifted. And so, owing to my own perverse irony and preponderance for instructive, philosophical self-amusements, I’m going to relay a bit of that essay here. And then I’m going to have some fun. So with that said, old-me, you feel like talking about Poe? Maybe Ligeia specifically? Ok, he does…
“This story has a lot of symbolism in it. First off [sic] all, Poe makes the story very mysterious and vague by not naming the cities or locatoins [sic, where the fuck was spellcheck?!] in which the story took place. Ligeia was, to Poe, the perfect woman. It is everything he ever wanted, or he thought he wanted. She was beautiful and intelligent and, so he thought, the perfect complement to his personality. But she died. She was taken away from him, as he believed everything always was. Then she came back. His redemption has finally come. He received what he had longed for all this time. The room in which Ligeia resuscitates in is a symbol. It has an eerie feel to it. It represents the torture in Poe’s soul. The revival of Ligeia in this chamber represents how someone has come to save him from this self-induced hell.”
Long paragraph there. Several good observations. Some a bit off [sic] base, a bit akimbo. But nothing too terrible there, I suppose. A few moments of confusing narrator and author. Tense agreement in a few sentences. Some good adjectives though. The folder date implies this was high school, junior year maybe? The reason I bring this bit of sophomoric criticism up at all, the reason I choose to write about it now, is that in reading it, I could almost see through the fog a bit. What does that mean? From here, I mean. I read Ligeia recently, in the last few months. But when I did, I had certainly forgotten that, two decades ago, I had apparently been able to say the same thing.
As I said, Lil’ Me’s not really wrong about anything. In terms of literary criticism, it’s lacking in that it doesn’t provide explication, strong supporting details for the arguments made. In terms of composition, aside from some wordy, redundant sentences and a few spelling errors, there’s nothing technically wrong with it. And the observations are sound. The whole bit about his perfect woman coming to save him from his own torment was a bit bewildering until I started looking at it from the context of writing this next paragraph, and then I think I thought I got what he was trying to say. So let’s give it another shot. From memory.
“At heart the symbolic nature of Poe’s Ligiea is rooted in the resonances of Poe’s entire catalogue. The story sticks to the brain, sticks to the memory, because of those traces; it is a quintessential Poe tale. One would, and surely could, argue that the nature of Ligiea‘s resurrection, central to the plot of the story, is the resonance most true to the author’s style, in that it combines the ‘death of a beautiful woman’ concept that is commonly ascribed as Poe’s most beloved thing with his ‘eyes as the window to the soul’ motif, that is conceptualized here through the shifting of the dying woman’s irises to that of her phoenix-like counterpart. One could argue that. But I’m not going to do that.
“Poe sets the story nowhere. An abandoned place in a shrouded country. An everywhere and nowhere. Poe’s strongest resonances have always occurred through his efforts at defamiliarization, whether it be turning a ghost town and a deserted castle not into a specific place but a representative of that place, or turning a coffee shop in London, as in The Man in the Crowd, into the hub of an off-hand lark into the darkness of a city and a soul. Poe could scare you. But not with zombie wives. It was that strange feeling that it would be so easy to just turn around to find the fog at your back and be… nowhere.”
Pretty textbook. But my God, that is so much more cogent, if a bit lengthy (you were supposed to shorten it goddamnit!) Now it has an argument. And an authority behind that argument, owing almost exclusively to word choice.
The purpose of this little exercise was not to jibe Lil’ Me. He was a ginger. He had enough shit to deal with. It was to look at something I had written and figure out what did and didn’t work. It was to examine the nature of style in short bits of writing for the point I’m about to make. The analysis of Poe’s standard symbolisms is still there, because it works, but it’s now backed up with supporting information, and not just the factual bits, but the argumentative parts, the logical connections.
This effort is applied not just in literary criticism. This is the way you write. This is what Gardner stresses in his fourth chapter, when he talks about jazzing around. In discussing the narrative of Beowulf, he points to the profluence of the narrative dealing with the symbolism of the Platonic soul, defamiliarized into the forms of three beasts. This is a delightful interpretation of the tale. It implies logical plot connections do exist, and that they arise from symbolism. If one were to read it with this symbolic meaning in mind, the plot makes perfect sense!
How this applies to the short story though, and why I love it so, is that it really requires you to operate in a very tiny framework if you want to properly deliver that thematic resonance. A short story requires that cogent succinctness, that necessary quick linking of facts and observations and details and color. Your average novel spans hundreds of pages, with resonances often only existing momentarily as call-backs to previous pages. There’s just so much there to handle. So many characters, so many themes, so much plot, so much floating around. That’s not to say that a novel can’t leave you with thematic resonances, that it can’t “tie it all together.” Just that it’s easier to remember it when the short story does it.
When you read Poe, O’Connor, Faulkner’s copious collection of short stories that rivals the best of his novels, shit, Larry Brown, you bear witness to scenes, so many series of moments, completely unconnected through plot, but linked in the authors’ themes. And in so many ways, that feeling, that one that comes from observing the multitudes of placeholders of some Platonic idea, it can affect so much more profoundly than the raucous rampaging of an extended pretended life. In being so close to specific moments, short stories capture the very nature of existence – that our lives are defined, exist completely, in the resonances of every individual moment.
I’m going to go find that O’Connor essay. Ah hell, I’ll just reread the story and remember.