Genesis, Part 2. E. A. Poe

Creationists: Selected Essays: 1993-2006
by E. L. Doctorow

(Page 2 of 2)

It is in the pages of Genesis that the first two of the three major covenants between God and humanity are described. After the Flood, God assures Noah that He will not again lay waste to all creation in a flood. The sign of this covenant will be a rainbow in the clouds. Later, Abraham is commanded by God to resettle in Canaan, where he will be assured that he will eventually prevail as the father of many nations. Circumcision is the way Abraham and his descendants are to give sign of keeping this covenant. It is only in the next book, Exodus, that the final element of the covenantal religion - the Ten Commandments - will be given through Moses to his people. It is here that God will be identified as Yahweh and a ritualized sabbath - a simulation of God's day of rest after the Creation - is to be identified as the sign.

Apart from their religious profundity, this graduated series of exchanges between God and man has to remind us of the struggle for human distinction or identity in a precarious, brute life. This was the Bronze Age, after all. The Abrahamic generations were desert nomads, outlanders, who lived in tents while people such as the Egyptians lived in cities that were the heart of civilization. The ethnically diverse territory that Abraham and his descendants were called to was abuzz with Amorites and other Canaanite tribes. Under such difficult circumstances it is understandable that the Abrahamic nomads' desire to be a designated people living in a state of moral consequence would direct them to bond with one God rather than many gods, and to find their solace and their courage in His singularity, His totality. But that they did so was tantamount to genius - and a considerable advance in the moral career of the human race.

For finally, as to literary strategies, it is the invention of character that is most telling, and in the Genesis narratives it is God himself who is the most complex and riveting character. He seems at times to be as troubled and conflicted, as moved by the range of human feelings, as the human beings He has created. The personality of God cannot be an entirely unwitting set of traits in a theological text that declares that we are made in His image, after His likeness. There is an unmistakable implication of codependence. And this is no doubt some of the incentive for the idea expressed by the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua

Heschel that the immanence of God, His existence in us, is manifest in the goodness of human works, the mitzvoth or good deeds that reflect His nature. "Reverence . . . ," says the Rabbi, "is the discovery of the world as an allusion to God." And so in reverence and ethical action do our troubled conflicted minds find holiness, or bring it into being. Recognizing the glory of God is presumably our redemption, and our redemption is, presumably, His.

2.

E. A. Poe

These are the tales of Edgar Allan Poe
Not exactly the boy next door
from Poetry
a rock opera by Lou Reed

Edgar Allan Poe, that strange genius of a hack writer, lived in such a narcissistic cocoon of torment as to be all but blind to the booming American nation around him, and so, perversely, became a mythic presence in the American literary consciousness.

His life was an unremitting disaster. Orphaned at the age of two, he was the dysfunctional adoptee of an unforgiving surrogate father. A gambler and a drinker, Poe was booted out of the University of Virginia. He took it upon himself to drop out of West Point. When he married it was to a cousin, a tubercular child of thirteen. Committing himself to the freelance's life, he lived at the edge of poverty. A Southerner, he stood forever outside the ruling literary establishment of New England.

Poe's baleful yet wary expression in his most famous photo shows a man who believed he was born to suffer. If circumstances in his life were not propitious to suffering, he made sure to change them until they were. Deep in his understanding, almost as to be unconscious, was a respect for the driving power of his misery - that it could take manifold forms in ways he didn't even have to be aware of, as if not he, but it, could create. That goes well beyond his conscious understanding of what he called the Imp of the Perverse - the force within us that causes us to do just what brings on our destruction.

His fiction can be so spectacularly horror-ridden as to suggest its origin in his dreams. Premature burials, revenge murders, and multiple-personality disorders abound. In proportion to his total output, Poe kills more women than Shakespeare. He kills them and they come back. They haunt, they avenge, they forgive. They are born one from another and merge again in death. Alive, they are entombed. Dead, they are dentally abused. Loved or hated, alive or ghostly, they are objects of intense devotion. Poe would claim, on occasion, to have written some of these pieces with enough distance to make him laugh. I don't believe that. In his "Philosophy of Composition" he says the supreme subject for a poem is the death of a beautiful woman. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. Another poet could write supremely of the death of a hired man. Another of the death of a civilization. In fact, as a poet, our Edgar is not the poet Melville is, to say nothing of Whitman or Dickinson. He is not major. He did not produce enough to be a major poet, and he may even be too much of a prim prosodist to be considered a minor poet. "The Raven" is to poetry as Ravel's Boléro is to music: rhythmic and hypnotic on first hearing, a mere novelty everafter. Or evermore. Nowhere in his ravenous mourning for Lenore does Poe come near the simple lines of one of Wordsworth's poems about the death of a young woman, "A Spirit Did My Slumber Seal":

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

In these lines the poet does not claim an emotion; he gives us the means to create it in ourselves. Poe is usually a claimer. I have no great regard for his verse, though certainly his personality was that of "a poet to a T."

We do not move on from other writers of his century - Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville - as we move on from Poe. His love fantasies are, in their wild surmise, childlike. We read him young - for whom love is death and there is no one without the other - and go on from there. (I exempt Poe scholars who have found something the rest of us haven't. They argue for his work as Poe himself did. They take on his role of outsider. They suffer Henry James's opinion that "an enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive state of reflection.")

Copyright © 2006 by E.L. Doctorow.

About the Author

E. L. Doctorow's work has been published in thirty languages. His novels include Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, Lives of the Poets, World's Fair, Billy Bathgate, and The Waterworks. Among his honors are the National Book Award, two National Book Critics Circle awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. He lives and works in New York.