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Fantasy Fan, v. 2, issue 4, whole no. 16, December 1934
Page 54
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54 THE FANTASY FAN, December, 1934 takes the form of a gigantic horse. "The Man of the Crowd," telling of one who roams day and night to mingle with streams of people as if afraid to be alone, has quieter effects, but implies nothing less of cosmic fear. Poe's mind was never far from terror and decay, and we see in every tale, poem, and philosophical dialogue, a tense eagerness to fatom unplumbed wells of night, to pierce the veil of death, and to reign in fancy as lord of the frightful mysteries of time and space. Certain of Poe's tales possess an almost absolute perfection of artistic form which makes them veritable beacon-lights in the province of the short story. Poe could, when he wished, give to his prose a richly poetic cast; employing that archaic and Orientalised style with jeweled phrase, quasi-Biblical repetition, and recurreent burthen so successfully used by later writers like Oscar Wilde and Lord Dunsany,; and in the cases where he has done this we have an effect of lyrical phantasy almost narcotic in essence-- an opium pageant of dream, with every unnatural colour and grotesque image bodied forth in a symphony of corresponding sound. "The Masque of the Red Death," "Silence, a Fable," and "Shadow, a Parable," are assuredly poems in every sense of the word save the meterical one and owe as much of their power to aural cadence as to visual imagery. But it is in two of the less openly poetic tales, "Ligeia," and "The Fall of the House of Usher," --especially the latter--that one finds those very summits of artistry whereby Poe takes his place at the head of fictional miniaturists. Simple and straight-forward in plot, both of these tales owe their supreme magic to the cunning development which appears in the selection and collocation of every least incident. "Ligeia" tells of a first wife of lofty and mysterious origin, who after death returns through a preternatural force of will to take possession of the body of a second wife; imposing even her physical appearance on the temporary reanimated corpse of her victim at the last moment. Despite a suspicion of prolixity and topheaviness, the narrative reaches its terrific climax with relentless power. "Usher," whose superiority in detail and proportion is very marked, hints shudderingly of obscure life in inorganic things, and displays an abnormally linked trinity of entities at the end of a long and isolated family history--a brother, his twin sister, and their incredibly ancient house all sharing a single soul and meeting one common dissolution at the same moment. These bizarre conceptions, so awkward in unskillful hands, become under Poe's spell living and convincing terrors to haunt our nights; and all because the author understood so perfectly the very mechanics and physiology of fear and strangeness--the essential details to emphasise, the precise incongruities and conceits to select as preliminaries or concomitants to horror, the exact incidents and allusions to throw out innocently in advance as symbols or prefigurincs of each major step toward the hideous denouement to come, the nice adjustments of cum-
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54 THE FANTASY FAN, December, 1934 takes the form of a gigantic horse. "The Man of the Crowd," telling of one who roams day and night to mingle with streams of people as if afraid to be alone, has quieter effects, but implies nothing less of cosmic fear. Poe's mind was never far from terror and decay, and we see in every tale, poem, and philosophical dialogue, a tense eagerness to fatom unplumbed wells of night, to pierce the veil of death, and to reign in fancy as lord of the frightful mysteries of time and space. Certain of Poe's tales possess an almost absolute perfection of artistic form which makes them veritable beacon-lights in the province of the short story. Poe could, when he wished, give to his prose a richly poetic cast; employing that archaic and Orientalised style with jeweled phrase, quasi-Biblical repetition, and recurreent burthen so successfully used by later writers like Oscar Wilde and Lord Dunsany,; and in the cases where he has done this we have an effect of lyrical phantasy almost narcotic in essence-- an opium pageant of dream, with every unnatural colour and grotesque image bodied forth in a symphony of corresponding sound. "The Masque of the Red Death," "Silence, a Fable," and "Shadow, a Parable," are assuredly poems in every sense of the word save the meterical one and owe as much of their power to aural cadence as to visual imagery. But it is in two of the less openly poetic tales, "Ligeia," and "The Fall of the House of Usher," --especially the latter--that one finds those very summits of artistry whereby Poe takes his place at the head of fictional miniaturists. Simple and straight-forward in plot, both of these tales owe their supreme magic to the cunning development which appears in the selection and collocation of every least incident. "Ligeia" tells of a first wife of lofty and mysterious origin, who after death returns through a preternatural force of will to take possession of the body of a second wife; imposing even her physical appearance on the temporary reanimated corpse of her victim at the last moment. Despite a suspicion of prolixity and topheaviness, the narrative reaches its terrific climax with relentless power. "Usher," whose superiority in detail and proportion is very marked, hints shudderingly of obscure life in inorganic things, and displays an abnormally linked trinity of entities at the end of a long and isolated family history--a brother, his twin sister, and their incredibly ancient house all sharing a single soul and meeting one common dissolution at the same moment. These bizarre conceptions, so awkward in unskillful hands, become under Poe's spell living and convincing terrors to haunt our nights; and all because the author understood so perfectly the very mechanics and physiology of fear and strangeness--the essential details to emphasise, the precise incongruities and conceits to select as preliminaries or concomitants to horror, the exact incidents and allusions to throw out innocently in advance as symbols or prefigurincs of each major step toward the hideous denouement to come, the nice adjustments of cum-
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