Poe: Spiritual Founder of Noir?
Edgar Allen Poe, founder of the detective story? Or drunkard, womanizer, lunatic and worst of all, lousy writer? This was the predominant view in the US from his death in 1849 for a hundred years. Twain called his prose unreadable, Edith Wharton said he was drunken and demoralized, Ralph Waldo Emerson termed him ‘the jingle man.’ In Britain TS Eliot said he had the intellect of a gifted child before puberty, Orwell called him ‘not far from insane,’ and DH Lawrence summed it up in a famous quote saying, “Poe tried alcohol, and any drug he could lay his hands on. He also tried any human being he could lay his hands on.”
One important exception: Arthur Conan Doyle acknowledged Poe as the creator of detective fiction along with French author Émile Gaboriau, and compared Holmes to Poe’s detective, C. Auguste Dupin. In A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes book published in 1887, Watson says to Holmes, “You remind me of Edgar Allen Poe's Dupin. I had no idea that such individuals did exist outside of stories.” BTW a cute trick to make Holmes appear real in comparison to the fictional Dupin.
Poe was a little crazy but he had ample justification for it. After losing his beloved mother to tuberculosis and then his foster mother to the same fate, he found happiness with his young bride, Virginia, only to watch her sing a song one evening and see a drop of blood appear on her lip, knowing what that would inevitably portend. The man went nuts after her death, spending endless hours at her grave and drinking himself to the edge of death. So if he later had periodic drinking bouts and once proposed to several women on the same day, he deserves a little compassion.
In France Poe took root long before he was accepted in the US. Bad boy poet Charles Baudelaire felt an artistic kinship with Poe and translated many of his stories and a couple longer works. Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), the 1857 volume including most of his poems, obsessed over death, decay, dirt, drink and desire (brownie points please for the alliteration!), so it’s easy to see how Poe’s obsessions would feel fraternal. Many of Poe’s stories appeared in 1840 under the title Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque. There’s been debate over what he meant by those two terms, but it’s pretty clear he was referencing the Gothic, which in literature conjures up decaying castles, monsters, the supernatural, a past that won’t go away and whatever terrifies.
The French love affair with Poe went on while Americans continued to treat him as a mediocre immoral drunk. The co-founder of Surrealism, André Breton, in his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, called Poe a prophet. Jules Verne, French author of early science fiction classics like Around the World in Eighty Days, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth, admired Poe and wrote a sequel to finish Poe’s bizarre novel-length tale The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.
That weird story, Poe’s only novel which he later called silly, narrates sea exploration, mutiny, cannibalism and some sci-fi postulates of the time like the ‘hollow earth theory’ (travel to one of the poles and you’ll find a large hole leading inside the earth where lost civilizations flourish). The narrative stops suddenly when Pym and Peters, one of the mutineers, drifting in a small boat towards Antarctica on a strangely warming current, encounter a huge white figure looming out of the mist. The editors added a note explaining Pym must have died at this point losing the final chapters of his narrative. Another play to link the fictional to the real BTW. Oh, for the days when the found document frame was a trendy way to start and end a novel!
Latin American authors like Julio Cortazar and Jorge Luis Borges adored Poe. From the 1920s to the 1980s Borges’ writings mention Poe more than 130 times according to critics obsessive enough to keep a tally. Most strikingly, he planned his own detective stories to commemorate the centennials of the publication of Poe’s three detective stories and almost made it. Poe’s first Dupin story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” a story that established the armchair detective trope married to gothic gruesome details, appeared in 1841; Borges “The Garden of Forking Paths” in 1941. The second Dupin story,“The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” a fictional solution of a true crime murder solved by ratiocination, from 1842, parallels Borges’ story “Death and the Compass,” 1942. To match Poe’s 1844 publication of the third Dupin story, “The Purloined Letter,” Borges aimed for the 1944 publication of “Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in his Labyrinth,” but had trouble perfecting the plot. It came out in 1951.
Americans finally embraced Poe after a century of belittling, and Poe, in a Gothic rising-from-the-dead twist, influenced noir. Noir depicts doomed victims or victimizers against a corrupt backdrop. Noir has a double nature: dark realism depicting trapped people and urban crime evoked with a lyrical or even surreal quality. Think distorted shadows, poetic renderings of seedy places, figures appearing out of darkness, a longing for the beauty embodied in some fashionably dressed femme fatale. This marriage of the crude realism of investigation and gunplay with dreamy perspectives and horror bordering on insanity goes right back to Poe. So recognizing Poe as a founder of crime fiction means recognizing the creepy influence of Gothic tropes.