Initially, I thought I’d begin this post with a brief summary of the life of Edgar Allan Poe, who lived and died within the first half of the nineteenth century. But then I went to Wikipedia to refresh my memory and I don’t know how anyone could write a summary of that life. It’s too much - the desperate, orphaned childhood, the love-hate relationship with his foster father, the loss after loss after loss, the doomed army stint, the gambling and ‘damnable propensity to drink’, the marrying a child cousin, the mysterious, disturbing end. (His last words, at the age of forty: ‘God help my poor soul’.) The only thing that burns through all the strange, unaccountable things that happened to him and the strange, unaccountable things that he did is a kind of dogged devotion to literature. The grim poverty he endured, so he could write his poems and stories. The way as a (sharp) reviewer, he alienated himself from the literati of his time by calling out Longfellow for being a bit rubbish.
Anyway, this post is about his work, and how it illustrates a defining pleasure of our genre: getting close to death without really getting close to it. That doesn’t mean his work is sad, exactly. He may have famously said death is the most melancholy topic, but I don’t think of melancholy when I think of his work. Does anyone? When we think of Poe’s work, we think of a pioneer of the short story form, an inventor of the detective genre. We think master of the macabre, of psychological horror.
If we don’t necessarily think of the psychological thriller, then we should. As a paper on the origins of this genre by Kristopher Mecholsky points out, he’ one of its most important forebears. To prove his point, Mecholsky lists defining themes of Poe’s work: unreliable narrators; themes of revenge; close relatives who turn out to be psychotic; the psychology of criminals and victims; the disintegration of character. Sound familiar?
I want to look specifically at one of Poe’s stories: The Premature Burial. Not because it’s my favourite of his works (it isn’t, though it’s fascinating and brilliant). It’s because for me it’s not just a story, it’s also a kind of writing manual wrapped up in a story – for writing fiction generally, but the psychological thriller in particular.
(Click this link to read the story first, though they do say there’s no spoiling a good story.)
The Premature Burial is told from the protagonist’s point of view and begins with a brief summation of catastrophic events that have occurred in human history but which do not make a good subject for fiction. Massacres, earthquakes – these are ‘entirely too horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction’ because they’re ‘vast generalities of disaster’. What you need for fiction, we’re told, is the particular. Mass disasters don’t work (too many characters!). And, apparently, not enough ‘ghastly extremes of agony’, which tend to be endured by ‘man the unit and never by man the mass’.
From this strange jumping point, the third paragraph startles with its opening line:
‘To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.’
Eh. I guess so. Never really thought about it before … But the reader is thinking of it now, as on the erudite, apparently rational narrator goes, recounting grisly instance after grisly instance from the annals of history where this actually happened to someone. A husband opens the family vault three years after his wife was buried there, only for her standing skeleton to collapse into his arms. A heartbroken man exhumes the body of his since-married-to-someone-else and recently deceased ex-lover, with the ‘romantic purpose of disinterring the corpse and possessing himself of her luxurious tresses’ only for her eyes to open while he’s doing so (shame Poe never got to write Valentine’s cards). A corpse being experimented on by medical students is shocked back to life. John Gardner, in his well-worth-reading The Art of Fiction, emphasises ‘vivid detail’ as the thing that makes the ‘fictional dream’ happen, and in all these accounts there is enough vivid detail – not only of the grisly but of the mundane too – to ensure we stay in this fictional dream.
As does the scholarly, considered air of the protagonist. It’s worth reading this story out loud by the way, to really hear the rhythm and intelligence in the writing; it’s like a piece of impressive oratory (though maybe don’t do this if you’re on the bus). You can almost hear the protagonist-narrator’s voice, which starts with a scholarly air as he shares these stories, discussing how in each one the individual concerned succumbed to some illness that made them appear dead, and were assumed to be so, only for them to regain consciousness after burial. We are with him when he observes that this has been the fate of many more people than we can know of, considering how usually, when a person is buried, for the most part no one’s going to find out, except of course for the poor soul who finds himself in such an unfortunate position.
And then, just as you’re wondering, what’s with this guy’s obsession with being buried alive, so elegantly it comes: It’s because he suffers from some mysterious illness which descends now and then and has him appear to all extents and purposes to be dead. When this happens:
for weeks, all was void, and black, and silent, and Nothing became the universe.
Yikes. This has made him, understandably, a bit worried. The clinical, academic persona slipping, he confides how over the years he has developed a morbid fascination with ‘worms, tombs and epitaphs’. Like the characters in Halloween, he has grown fearful of sleep in case, on waking, he finds himself ‘the tenant of a grave’ and also because of a dreadful, recurrent nightmare in which ‘an unseen figure’ shows him a vision of millions of people across the world enduring a premature burial at that moment. (Turns out mass catastrophes can sometimes work their way into fiction after all.)
There was a feeble struggling; and there was a general sad unrest … a melancholy rustling from the garments of the buried.
All this has made him a bit annoying. He doesn’t like to leave his home. He makes all his friends swear they won’t let him be buried until after his body has started to decompose. He makes some fancy changes to the family vault, like adding cushioning and a clever lever thing that allows it to be opened from within. But none of it helps. He even starts worrying that he’s become so annoying, should he fall ill again, his friends might be glad to have a way of being rid of him altogether (talk about the perfect crime).
And then, one day he wakes to find his worst nightmare has come true.
Though he has opened his eyes, he is in total darkness. When he tries to call out, he discovers his jaw has been bound up. He is not in his bed, but ‘lying on some hard substance’ and when he moves his arms, he hits against a ‘solid wooden substance’ inches from his face. There is the ‘strong peculiar odour of moist earth’. It doesn’t take long to realise that not only has he been buried alive, he’s not in the family vault, but ‘nailed up in some common coffin’.
Except, having been thus terrified, we learn in the next paragraph that actually he hasn’t. I knew of an English teacher who used to tell his pupils they could write anything they wanted in their creative writing essays as long as it didn’t end with, ‘And then he woke up.’ This must be the original ‘And then I woke up’ story. Turns out he’s on a boat for some vague reason that doesn’t exactly tally with us having been told he doesn’t like to stray from home. And there are all these logical explanations for the smell of soil and the boards above and below him, etc. I’m not sure I buy his ‘born again’ vibe at the end either, where he goes abroad and takes up exercise and breathes ‘the free air of heaven’ and throws out all his morbid medical books.
But I’m not sure it matters very much. Early in the story, we are given this lovely line:
The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and insubstantial. Who shall say where one ends and the other begins?
And really that’s what the story is about. Taking the reader by the hand and gently leading them them right up to the edge of this rather scary thing, this place right there, literally in the shadows of death. Just as they/we are peering over, even pretending to throw us in. And then, after the shock, a laugh shared as he leads us safely away (for now) .
‘Give them the pleasure of dread,’ said Hitchcock. ‘The pleasure they feel on waking from a nightmare’.
But the appeal of the psychological thriller is not just that it can bring us close to death. It’s also about the way it speaks to the experience of being alive. Next week we’ll look at what another nineteenth century writer of short stories had to say about it.
