Part 1 of The Fall of the House of Usher
Jan. 28th, 2015 07:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickSo I have this degree in English Literature, which mostly I don’t use for fuck-all because I’m a landlord and I spend more of my time replacing fill valves on toilets than explaining literature. This is, at least on some levels, a damn shame because explaining literature is something I’m pretty good at and enjoy doing. Pity it doesn’t pay as well as landlording.
I’ve about decided that explaining literature to people at large is a lot like telling them about your fantasy baseball team. Either (a) they already have their own fantasy baseball team that they have carefully, themselves, constructed OR (b) they don’t give two fucks for fantasy baseball. The people who fall into case (a) will maybe listen to you talk about your fantasy baseball team a little, because they’re hoping you know how to take turns and will eventually shut up so that they can talk about THEIR fantasy baseball team to you while you pretend to listen. However, the vast bulk of people in the world fall into case (b) where they don’t give two fucks for your fantasy baseball team no matter how describably awesome it is or how gung-ho you are about describing it. The rule for speaking to normal people about EITHER your fantasy baseball team OR the explication of literature is mostly “Don't”. :)
However, there does exist a case (c) of people in the wonderful world of explaining literature. Case (C) is Poor Bastards Who Just Need To Pass, Damn It, But Are Facing A Fucking Short Story Full Of Impenetrable Fucking Gothic Prose. It is to these Poor Bastards that I am devoting this explication of The Fall of the House of Usher by one Edgar Allan Poe, dead Baltimoron and excessively wordy fucker whose dense and impenetrable gothic prose has defeated many a Poor Bastard.
It’s been weighing on my mind, a while, the Fall of the House, because the horse people’s oldest boy (sixteen and a half) wound up asking me about the story of a Sunday night (paper due on Monday you betcha) because of his teacher’s evident FAIL at teaching the story to her class of redneck unenthusiastic readers. I think it was late November or early December – in a more reasonably-paced classroom, the story would have arriven at Halloween and thus have been thematically entertaining or whatevs. But, anyway, it was early winter and the boy was not having any luck engaging with the fucking text despite the fact that the class had spent THREE DAYS “engaging” with the text and had gotten a whopping eighteen paragraphs into the thing. (Amazingly, nobody had yet died of boredom.)
Him: “This is a stupid story and it makes no sense and I need to understand the rest of it for Monday because I have to write three pages on it.”
Me: “It’s a pretty neat story.”
Him: “It’s stupid. Can you just tell me what happens?”
Me: “No. Sit down and we’ll read it together.”
Him: “What? We don’t have that kind of time! We’ve spent three days on this and are only eighteen paragraphs in and I don’t even know what any of them are about!!”
Me: “Jesus fuck. Ay-ite. Sit yer ass down and we’re gonna Li-Tra-Chure over here. It will not take three days. I promise.”
So I got the text open to the relevant story and we began. You can play along if you like (the original story is in italics because I am assuming you as a reader are literary and know the fucking story by having Read It Before) or you can move on to something else more interesting. Shall we?
—————————————————————————–
The Fall of the House of Usher
Son coeur est un luth suspendu;
Sitot qu'on le touche il resonne.
DE BERANGER.
There’s a quote and crap but it’s in fucking French. If you have a footnote, read the footnote. If you don’t have a footnote, move on with your day.
1. During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was–but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasureable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me–upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain–upon the bleak walls–upon the vacant eye-like windows–upon a few rank sedges–and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees–with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium–the bitter lapse into everyday life–the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart–an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it–I paused to think–what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down–but with a shudder even more thrilling than before–upon the remodelled and inverted images of the grey sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.
Okay, so we have Paragraph 1. In literature, the first thing you do is Read For Meaning. We want the right-up-front, Just-the-Facts-Ma'am stuff here. It’s basic comprehension, without which what you have is word salad. The Just-the-Facts-Ma'am thing is this: Of an autumn evening, I’m riding along on my horse, and I’ve gotten to where I can see the house that is my destination. It’s creeping me out. Seriously, that’s all you get here in terms of the plot.
We’re not stopping with the plot because when you play Li-Tra-Chure, it’s not JUST about the plot. That’s for pulp fiction, where the plot is primary, important, and frequently the only item on the menu. Li-Tra-Chure has to do something more than just tell a story. It has to do it well, with stuff BESIDES plot for you to look at. (Pulp fiction can aspire to do this, as well, and when it succeeds, it makes the leap into Li-Tra-Chure like our man Poe, here.)
I’d like to look at mood in this paragraph. Poe is trying to create a mood because gothic horror is pretty much all about mood. Most horror is, until you get to torture porn like the Saw movies. You can (and should) be drawing from your experiences watching horror films for a grasp of how important the creation of mood is for a proper horror experience. Think about the creepy music and about how they’re mostly happening in the dark and how the cameras linger over fluttering curtains or doors swinging slowly shut… mood, amiright?
Anyway, looking at House of Usher, we’ve got lots of mood words here to help us out: dull, dark, soundless, autumn, clouds oppressively low (It’s not just overcast. No, we have Oppressively Low Clouds, here.), singularly dreary, shades of evening (shades is also like a word for ghosts), melancholy. All that is in THE FIRST SENTENCE, kiddies. ONE SENTENCE IN and we can tell that this is not going to be a happy story. Continuing on: insufferable gloom, mere house, and the simple landscape features, bleak walls, vacant eye-like windows, rank sedges, white trunks of decayed trees. This is supposed to be building for you a mood of creepy.
If you are too dumb to know how this is supposed to be making you feel, you can look at our narrator, who helpfully tells us how it’s making him feel: “an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium–the bitter lapse into everyday life–the hideous dropping off of the veil”. “It feels like coming down off a high.” In case you’re not an opium addict (Poe was), he adds: “There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart,” and all this is really creeping him out though he can’t put his finger on why.
Maybe, he thinks, a change in perspective would help. So he rides up to the tarn (pond) and looks at the reflection, there. Nope, it’s still creepy, just upside down now. (I’m summarizing the following: It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down–but with a shudder even more thrilling than before–upon the remodelled and inverted images of the grey sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.) So, there, we have paragraph 1, plot and mood. Plot: I’ve about got to where I’m going. Mood: Creepy as hell.
We can look a little further, here, at the house. We’re looking at it because the name of the story is The Fall of the House of Usher. Like, the house is important. It’s right there in the title, it is, so it’s fucking important. Now, you may be reading with the subtlety of a tenth-grade redneck boy who isn’t particularly interested in literature and who stumbles over words like lustre, tarn, and precipitous, so imma help you out here. “The House of Usher” can refer to the family mansion, the creepy-ass house what our narrator is riding up to AND ALSO it can refer to the family itself that is living inside the creepy-ass house. In fact, the way the title is written, it is unclear whether Poe is talking about the fall of (a) the family mansion or (b) the peeps who reside therein. Maybe, say I, Poe’s Fall is about both the mansion and the people. (He does make it a point to tell us, twice, about the Vacant and Eye-Like Windows. Y'know, to make the house more people-like.)
And if he is talking about both, perhaps he is going to use the physical structure of the family mansion to reflect on the condition of the family inside? Like, maybe for Poe, the house and the people that live inside of it are connected. (This is one of the “more than just plot” items that literature has on offer for you. Talking about the house to illuminate the people who live inside it is using the house as an Extended Metaphor, one a them thar Literary Techniques what you might could find in a real Li-Tra-Chure sort of a thing.)
2. Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of my boon companions in boyhood; but many years had elapsed since our last meeting. A letter, however, had lately reached me in a distant part of the country–a letter from him–which, in its wildly importunate nature, had admitted of no other than a personal reply. The MS gave evidence of nervous agitation. The writer spoke of acute bodily illness–of a mental disorder which oppressed him–and of an earnest desire to see me, as his best, and indeed his only personal friend, with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation of his malady. It was the manner in which all this, and much more, was said–it was the apparent heart that went with his request–which allowed me no room for hesitation; and I accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still considered a very singular summons.
Compared with our first, mood-front paragraph, this second paragraph is chock-the-fuck-full of information and plotly goodness. We still get mansion of gloom, but mostly Poe has left the purple frilly prose of gothic horror behind and moved on to giving us some backstory. As always, we first read for Just-The-Facts-Ma’m meaning. And it is thus: I’m visiting the creepy house for a while because I got a letter from my childhood friend Roderick Usher, whom I haven’t seen in ages. Roderick’s letter, which sounded pretty desperate, asked me as ‘his best and only friend’ to come visit to help cheer him up. So, I got on my horse and headed out to visit him.
We get the why of the visit here, but we get some more than that. Roderick hasn’t met our narrator for “many years”. And yet, Roderick wrote him, wildly importunate (You have to look stuff up if you don’t understand it. Sorry about that, but it’s important. If you google “wildly importunate” you get stuff related to the House of Usher for the first whole page. Not a lot of writers have used the phrase, I guess. Importunate means “persistent, especially to the point of annoyance or intrusion” and of course “wildly” means ever so much more so. So, “wildly importunate” is an excessively forward and extreme request. It’s asking a hell of a lot.) as our narrator is Roderick’s best and indeed only personal friend. What kind of person has only one friend, and still, having only one friend, doesn’t meet up with him for “many years”? That’s kind of odd, isn’t it? I mean, if you’re a hen with one chick, wouldn’t you be spending some time and attention on your one chick? Just something to think about, here.
Also in this paragraph we learn that Roderick is not well. He’s got nervous agitation, acute bodily illness, a mental disorder which oppressed him. Why are we getting this? Well, because it might, probably, be important to the story.
The thing here is that when you’re reading a piece of fiction writing, absolutely everything, every detail, every happening, every everything in it is a choice. It’s all made up out of whole cloth and the threads that make that cloth are CHOSEN, hopefully well-chosen, to add to the overall effect. Like, for example, when our narrator is riding along on a cloudy autumn evening en route to the House of Usher, those details are pulled out of Poe’s mind. It could just as easily have been a “spring morning” or a “bright, clear winter day” or “a warm summer day” or “the cold, steel rains of early March” or any other time, ever. Poe PICKED a cloudy autumn evening out of the millions upon millions of choices he could have made for the setting. It’s purposeful, it is, and we as readers should at least pause to consider why he made that choice and what it might add to the world that Poe is building for us. On the cloudy-autumn-evening front, you should pull “getting dark – colors fading to monochrome” and “close of day – an ending” and “autumn – ending of the year” and also “autumn is 'fall’ like fall of the house, sorta”. So, autumn is thematic and helps with the mood. Probably that’s why it was chosen.
But, I digress. (I digress a lot, get used to it.) Why are we being told that Roderick is, pretty much, a nutcase? Because it’s important. Roderick could just as easily have been fighting pneumonia or be down with polio or some other ailment. But he’s a nutjob. The ailment was chosen, on purpose, to help add to the story we are being told. Onward!
3. Although, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet I really knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and habitual. I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament, displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted art, and manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognisable beauties of musical science. I had learned, too, the very remarkable fact, that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honoured as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain. It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over in thought the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon the possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries, might have exercised upon the other–it was this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the “House of Usher”–an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion.
Paragraph 3 RFM: Roderick’s always been kinda reserved, even back when we were kids. His family does art, charity, and musical science – all money’d rich-people pursuits, no 'real jobs’ to be seen – and the family is just one family line – no cousins or whatnot, just straight-up father, son, father, son. The lack of branches on the family tree has caused the locals to call both the family and the family mansion The House of Usher. Now, I do have the advantage of having read the story beforehand and knowing how it comes out, but just in case you didn’t COME to the story with the notion that “the house of Usher” can refer to the house and also the people who live in it, at the same time, Poe hands it to you right here. He doesn’t want you to miss out on the Li Tra Chure happenings. :)
And as an aside, I’d like to address the dense and impenetrable gothic prose thing. I, in the opening of this journey into House of Usher, accused Poe of dense and impenetrable gothic prose and perhaps it came to pass that you, dear reader, were all Whatchoo Talkin’ Bout Willis? as regards the Dense and Impenetrable Gothic Prose. Examine the last sentence in the above paragraph: It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over in thought the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon the possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries, might have exercised upon the other–it was this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the “House of Usher”–an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion. That’s like six lines of text, there. Yeah, we get punctuation to help us out, but still that’s a sentence big enough to make you pass out trying to be reading that all in one breath. (When I was but a sprog, we were told that a sentence or clause should take about one breath to read.) Looking at that monster, it’s pretty clear that literary style has changed a bit since Poe’s time; modern readers don’t have much truck with sentences that fucking big, but back in the day, it was OK to do that sort of thing to Everyday Readers. Like, normal people back then read Poe, for fun, on purpose, in their own leisure time, without having to do it for school. It was trashy writing in its day, designed to appeal to the public.
The structure of the sentence is lovely and I’d like to unwind it a bit for fun and profit (mostly fun), so bear with me as I digress yet again, this time to grammar and whatnot. (We will eventually get to the exciting conclusion of the short story, but if you thought in any way that this was the soft route compared to actually sitting down and reading the story for class, you thought wrong. Odds are good that you’re going to learn about eight times as much crap reading along as I read it for you than you would have learned if you just read it yourself.) The sentence at hand is a whomping big fuck, divided in two parts by the dash and repeated “it was this deficiency…” Now, at least for me, the first rule of sentence diagramming is to break the damn thing down into manageable parts, so that you don’t choke on them. We’re gonna use that natural division (the dash and the repeated “it was this deficiency”) and look at each half in turn.
On the first half, we need a subject and a verb. For basic sentences like 'John threw the ball’ the subject of the sentence is the one doing the acting. In 'John threw the ball’, the subject is John. The verb is the action: threw. The direct object is what gets action done to it: ball. So, turn your weary eyes back to Poe. Sentence starts “It was” Subject, verb? Maybe. But then we have “I considered, while blah blah blah…” Starts out like we’re talking 'bout the deficiency, but then the bulk of the first half of the thing goes on with all kinds of shit regarding WHEN and HOW and WHAT our narrator is considerating. I looked at this a couple of different ways (at the beginner end of sentence diagramming, it’s got lots of right and wrong answers, but when you get to harder sentences you get to make artistic/explicatory choices when diagramming, depending on what you want to get out of the damn thing) and I finally chose to do the first half of the thing as “I considered” rather than “It was” because of the adverbial info that dominates the predicate-ish part of the first half. Doing it as “I considered” gives you, the diagram-looker-atter, a better idea of what the hell is going on, assuming you have any damn idea of what sentence diagramming is or how it works. (Probably you don’t. Zero fucks are being given, over here. What I do is me–for that I came. Gerard Manly Hopkins, plus also a fantastic piece of clex fanfic regarding corsetry written by seperis and Teland.)
We have “I considered this deficiency” – that’s pretty much the first half of the sentence. The rest is is window-dressing about how and when and what he’s considering. Poe’s trying to give you a sense of our narrator’s reasoning, here, why he’s thinking what he’s thinking. Poe's two points in the first half are “the house and its residents match up pretty well in character” and “I wonder, how much has one (the house) influenced the other (its residents) over the years?”
Here’s the pic for that:
The second half of the sentence, after the dash and after we’ve been fully briefed on what sort of considering our narrator has done, refocuses us upon the deficiency, which is honestly the point of the sentence. We’ve got two adjectival prepositional phrases, of issue and of transmission, modifying 'deficiency’ and then a which-had-identified clause thingie that further illuminates the aforesaid deficiency. It’s a very nested construct and untangling it is more than enough to defeat most Poor Bastards (see intro). Here’s a pic of that one, sorry it’s so tiny but I had a hell of a time getting it to fit on one sheet and honestly I’m not too sure about the “seemed to include both” construct but it’s the best I could do under the circumstances:
Consider, though, the fact that Poe makes you work for the meaning. The meaning isn’t all that… it’s complex but not unknowably so. I get the impression reading this that the text itself is foreboding and overwrought and really, not all that fucking accessible. I mean, yeah, some of the style of the prose is a feature of its age, but Poe has sentences that don’t take a forklift to move around. He can write simply if he wants. (We’ll see some examples later on in this text. I’ll be sure to point 'em out to you.) Here, he don’t wanna. Why is that?
Second half of the sentence is mostly “Since the family tree is sort of a stick, and since the house goes just from father to son over and over, locals in these parts use “The House of Usher” to refer to the people and the house together like they’re one and the same.“ As I said above, he’s pointing out the Li Tra Chure goings on so that you don’t miss out on his mad stylins. Me, I have drawn diagrams of this masterwork of a sentence so that you don’t miss out on MY mad stylin’.
4. I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment–that of looking down within the tarn–had been to deepen the first singular impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition—for why should I not so term it?–served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. And it might have been for this reason only, that, when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy–a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity—an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the grey wall, and the silent tarn–a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.
Reading for meaning, paragraph 4: Man, the house is Still Creepy. And really, thinking on how creepy it is, I’m probably sorta weirding myself out about it.
And obviously, reading for literature purposes, we have a theme thing here. The theme thing is when you start thinking terror, you can kind of whammy yourself by thinking about it. Our narrator says that terror is one of those things that builds and feeds upon itself, spiraling out of control. (Actual line is this: “There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition—for why should I not so term it?–served mainly to accelerate the increase itself.”)
Let’s consider this notion, because it’s something Poe has felt moved to share with us in this narrative. Why is Poe telling us how terror works? Because (a) it’s kinda neat and cool to tell us what the story is gonna do before it does it and (b) it’s even cooler to do so within the story itself and © authors get off on this sort of elegant coolness.
In the literary world, telling you what is gonna happen before it actually happens is called foreshadowing instead of prophecy. You want to be reading onward, dear reader, with the notion of terror building upon itself and spiraling out of control. Madness, I feel moved to note, works the same way. :) And, for advanced students, the action in a story starts slowly and builds in a narrative arc, hopefully getting rather more gripping as it proceeds to a climax (yeah, I’m snickering over here, too)… spiraling out of control, kinda, as well.
Note that our narrator, bless his heart, is careful to tell us that his ever-so-thoughtfully-described case of the creeps is a strange fancy–a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed me. Bae, read that shit. “I got this weird idea, totally out of left field, and I’m only mentioning it to show how freaking weirded out I was.” He might as well just evaluate the bogeyman noise as, "Heck, it was probably just the wind…” and be done with it. It’d be just as convincing…
I’ve about decided that explaining literature to people at large is a lot like telling them about your fantasy baseball team. Either (a) they already have their own fantasy baseball team that they have carefully, themselves, constructed OR (b) they don’t give two fucks for fantasy baseball. The people who fall into case (a) will maybe listen to you talk about your fantasy baseball team a little, because they’re hoping you know how to take turns and will eventually shut up so that they can talk about THEIR fantasy baseball team to you while you pretend to listen. However, the vast bulk of people in the world fall into case (b) where they don’t give two fucks for your fantasy baseball team no matter how describably awesome it is or how gung-ho you are about describing it. The rule for speaking to normal people about EITHER your fantasy baseball team OR the explication of literature is mostly “Don't”. :)
However, there does exist a case (c) of people in the wonderful world of explaining literature. Case (C) is Poor Bastards Who Just Need To Pass, Damn It, But Are Facing A Fucking Short Story Full Of Impenetrable Fucking Gothic Prose. It is to these Poor Bastards that I am devoting this explication of The Fall of the House of Usher by one Edgar Allan Poe, dead Baltimoron and excessively wordy fucker whose dense and impenetrable gothic prose has defeated many a Poor Bastard.
It’s been weighing on my mind, a while, the Fall of the House, because the horse people’s oldest boy (sixteen and a half) wound up asking me about the story of a Sunday night (paper due on Monday you betcha) because of his teacher’s evident FAIL at teaching the story to her class of redneck unenthusiastic readers. I think it was late November or early December – in a more reasonably-paced classroom, the story would have arriven at Halloween and thus have been thematically entertaining or whatevs. But, anyway, it was early winter and the boy was not having any luck engaging with the fucking text despite the fact that the class had spent THREE DAYS “engaging” with the text and had gotten a whopping eighteen paragraphs into the thing. (Amazingly, nobody had yet died of boredom.)
Him: “This is a stupid story and it makes no sense and I need to understand the rest of it for Monday because I have to write three pages on it.”
Me: “It’s a pretty neat story.”
Him: “It’s stupid. Can you just tell me what happens?”
Me: “No. Sit down and we’ll read it together.”
Him: “What? We don’t have that kind of time! We’ve spent three days on this and are only eighteen paragraphs in and I don’t even know what any of them are about!!”
Me: “Jesus fuck. Ay-ite. Sit yer ass down and we’re gonna Li-Tra-Chure over here. It will not take three days. I promise.”
So I got the text open to the relevant story and we began. You can play along if you like (the original story is in italics because I am assuming you as a reader are literary and know the fucking story by having Read It Before) or you can move on to something else more interesting. Shall we?
—————————————————————————–
The Fall of the House of Usher
Son coeur est un luth suspendu;
Sitot qu'on le touche il resonne.
DE BERANGER.
There’s a quote and crap but it’s in fucking French. If you have a footnote, read the footnote. If you don’t have a footnote, move on with your day.
1. During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was–but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasureable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me–upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain–upon the bleak walls–upon the vacant eye-like windows–upon a few rank sedges–and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees–with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium–the bitter lapse into everyday life–the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart–an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it–I paused to think–what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down–but with a shudder even more thrilling than before–upon the remodelled and inverted images of the grey sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.
Okay, so we have Paragraph 1. In literature, the first thing you do is Read For Meaning. We want the right-up-front, Just-the-Facts-Ma'am stuff here. It’s basic comprehension, without which what you have is word salad. The Just-the-Facts-Ma'am thing is this: Of an autumn evening, I’m riding along on my horse, and I’ve gotten to where I can see the house that is my destination. It’s creeping me out. Seriously, that’s all you get here in terms of the plot.
We’re not stopping with the plot because when you play Li-Tra-Chure, it’s not JUST about the plot. That’s for pulp fiction, where the plot is primary, important, and frequently the only item on the menu. Li-Tra-Chure has to do something more than just tell a story. It has to do it well, with stuff BESIDES plot for you to look at. (Pulp fiction can aspire to do this, as well, and when it succeeds, it makes the leap into Li-Tra-Chure like our man Poe, here.)
I’d like to look at mood in this paragraph. Poe is trying to create a mood because gothic horror is pretty much all about mood. Most horror is, until you get to torture porn like the Saw movies. You can (and should) be drawing from your experiences watching horror films for a grasp of how important the creation of mood is for a proper horror experience. Think about the creepy music and about how they’re mostly happening in the dark and how the cameras linger over fluttering curtains or doors swinging slowly shut… mood, amiright?
Anyway, looking at House of Usher, we’ve got lots of mood words here to help us out: dull, dark, soundless, autumn, clouds oppressively low (It’s not just overcast. No, we have Oppressively Low Clouds, here.), singularly dreary, shades of evening (shades is also like a word for ghosts), melancholy. All that is in THE FIRST SENTENCE, kiddies. ONE SENTENCE IN and we can tell that this is not going to be a happy story. Continuing on: insufferable gloom, mere house, and the simple landscape features, bleak walls, vacant eye-like windows, rank sedges, white trunks of decayed trees. This is supposed to be building for you a mood of creepy.
If you are too dumb to know how this is supposed to be making you feel, you can look at our narrator, who helpfully tells us how it’s making him feel: “an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium–the bitter lapse into everyday life–the hideous dropping off of the veil”. “It feels like coming down off a high.” In case you’re not an opium addict (Poe was), he adds: “There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart,” and all this is really creeping him out though he can’t put his finger on why.
Maybe, he thinks, a change in perspective would help. So he rides up to the tarn (pond) and looks at the reflection, there. Nope, it’s still creepy, just upside down now. (I’m summarizing the following: It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down–but with a shudder even more thrilling than before–upon the remodelled and inverted images of the grey sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.) So, there, we have paragraph 1, plot and mood. Plot: I’ve about got to where I’m going. Mood: Creepy as hell.
We can look a little further, here, at the house. We’re looking at it because the name of the story is The Fall of the House of Usher. Like, the house is important. It’s right there in the title, it is, so it’s fucking important. Now, you may be reading with the subtlety of a tenth-grade redneck boy who isn’t particularly interested in literature and who stumbles over words like lustre, tarn, and precipitous, so imma help you out here. “The House of Usher” can refer to the family mansion, the creepy-ass house what our narrator is riding up to AND ALSO it can refer to the family itself that is living inside the creepy-ass house. In fact, the way the title is written, it is unclear whether Poe is talking about the fall of (a) the family mansion or (b) the peeps who reside therein. Maybe, say I, Poe’s Fall is about both the mansion and the people. (He does make it a point to tell us, twice, about the Vacant and Eye-Like Windows. Y'know, to make the house more people-like.)
And if he is talking about both, perhaps he is going to use the physical structure of the family mansion to reflect on the condition of the family inside? Like, maybe for Poe, the house and the people that live inside of it are connected. (This is one of the “more than just plot” items that literature has on offer for you. Talking about the house to illuminate the people who live inside it is using the house as an Extended Metaphor, one a them thar Literary Techniques what you might could find in a real Li-Tra-Chure sort of a thing.)
2. Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of my boon companions in boyhood; but many years had elapsed since our last meeting. A letter, however, had lately reached me in a distant part of the country–a letter from him–which, in its wildly importunate nature, had admitted of no other than a personal reply. The MS gave evidence of nervous agitation. The writer spoke of acute bodily illness–of a mental disorder which oppressed him–and of an earnest desire to see me, as his best, and indeed his only personal friend, with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation of his malady. It was the manner in which all this, and much more, was said–it was the apparent heart that went with his request–which allowed me no room for hesitation; and I accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still considered a very singular summons.
Compared with our first, mood-front paragraph, this second paragraph is chock-the-fuck-full of information and plotly goodness. We still get mansion of gloom, but mostly Poe has left the purple frilly prose of gothic horror behind and moved on to giving us some backstory. As always, we first read for Just-The-Facts-Ma’m meaning. And it is thus: I’m visiting the creepy house for a while because I got a letter from my childhood friend Roderick Usher, whom I haven’t seen in ages. Roderick’s letter, which sounded pretty desperate, asked me as ‘his best and only friend’ to come visit to help cheer him up. So, I got on my horse and headed out to visit him.
We get the why of the visit here, but we get some more than that. Roderick hasn’t met our narrator for “many years”. And yet, Roderick wrote him, wildly importunate (You have to look stuff up if you don’t understand it. Sorry about that, but it’s important. If you google “wildly importunate” you get stuff related to the House of Usher for the first whole page. Not a lot of writers have used the phrase, I guess. Importunate means “persistent, especially to the point of annoyance or intrusion” and of course “wildly” means ever so much more so. So, “wildly importunate” is an excessively forward and extreme request. It’s asking a hell of a lot.) as our narrator is Roderick’s best and indeed only personal friend. What kind of person has only one friend, and still, having only one friend, doesn’t meet up with him for “many years”? That’s kind of odd, isn’t it? I mean, if you’re a hen with one chick, wouldn’t you be spending some time and attention on your one chick? Just something to think about, here.
Also in this paragraph we learn that Roderick is not well. He’s got nervous agitation, acute bodily illness, a mental disorder which oppressed him. Why are we getting this? Well, because it might, probably, be important to the story.
The thing here is that when you’re reading a piece of fiction writing, absolutely everything, every detail, every happening, every everything in it is a choice. It’s all made up out of whole cloth and the threads that make that cloth are CHOSEN, hopefully well-chosen, to add to the overall effect. Like, for example, when our narrator is riding along on a cloudy autumn evening en route to the House of Usher, those details are pulled out of Poe’s mind. It could just as easily have been a “spring morning” or a “bright, clear winter day” or “a warm summer day” or “the cold, steel rains of early March” or any other time, ever. Poe PICKED a cloudy autumn evening out of the millions upon millions of choices he could have made for the setting. It’s purposeful, it is, and we as readers should at least pause to consider why he made that choice and what it might add to the world that Poe is building for us. On the cloudy-autumn-evening front, you should pull “getting dark – colors fading to monochrome” and “close of day – an ending” and “autumn – ending of the year” and also “autumn is 'fall’ like fall of the house, sorta”. So, autumn is thematic and helps with the mood. Probably that’s why it was chosen.
But, I digress. (I digress a lot, get used to it.) Why are we being told that Roderick is, pretty much, a nutcase? Because it’s important. Roderick could just as easily have been fighting pneumonia or be down with polio or some other ailment. But he’s a nutjob. The ailment was chosen, on purpose, to help add to the story we are being told. Onward!
3. Although, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet I really knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and habitual. I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament, displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted art, and manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognisable beauties of musical science. I had learned, too, the very remarkable fact, that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honoured as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain. It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over in thought the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon the possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries, might have exercised upon the other–it was this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the “House of Usher”–an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion.
Paragraph 3 RFM: Roderick’s always been kinda reserved, even back when we were kids. His family does art, charity, and musical science – all money’d rich-people pursuits, no 'real jobs’ to be seen – and the family is just one family line – no cousins or whatnot, just straight-up father, son, father, son. The lack of branches on the family tree has caused the locals to call both the family and the family mansion The House of Usher. Now, I do have the advantage of having read the story beforehand and knowing how it comes out, but just in case you didn’t COME to the story with the notion that “the house of Usher” can refer to the house and also the people who live in it, at the same time, Poe hands it to you right here. He doesn’t want you to miss out on the Li Tra Chure happenings. :)
And as an aside, I’d like to address the dense and impenetrable gothic prose thing. I, in the opening of this journey into House of Usher, accused Poe of dense and impenetrable gothic prose and perhaps it came to pass that you, dear reader, were all Whatchoo Talkin’ Bout Willis? as regards the Dense and Impenetrable Gothic Prose. Examine the last sentence in the above paragraph: It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over in thought the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon the possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries, might have exercised upon the other–it was this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the “House of Usher”–an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion. That’s like six lines of text, there. Yeah, we get punctuation to help us out, but still that’s a sentence big enough to make you pass out trying to be reading that all in one breath. (When I was but a sprog, we were told that a sentence or clause should take about one breath to read.) Looking at that monster, it’s pretty clear that literary style has changed a bit since Poe’s time; modern readers don’t have much truck with sentences that fucking big, but back in the day, it was OK to do that sort of thing to Everyday Readers. Like, normal people back then read Poe, for fun, on purpose, in their own leisure time, without having to do it for school. It was trashy writing in its day, designed to appeal to the public.
The structure of the sentence is lovely and I’d like to unwind it a bit for fun and profit (mostly fun), so bear with me as I digress yet again, this time to grammar and whatnot. (We will eventually get to the exciting conclusion of the short story, but if you thought in any way that this was the soft route compared to actually sitting down and reading the story for class, you thought wrong. Odds are good that you’re going to learn about eight times as much crap reading along as I read it for you than you would have learned if you just read it yourself.) The sentence at hand is a whomping big fuck, divided in two parts by the dash and repeated “it was this deficiency…” Now, at least for me, the first rule of sentence diagramming is to break the damn thing down into manageable parts, so that you don’t choke on them. We’re gonna use that natural division (the dash and the repeated “it was this deficiency”) and look at each half in turn.
On the first half, we need a subject and a verb. For basic sentences like 'John threw the ball’ the subject of the sentence is the one doing the acting. In 'John threw the ball’, the subject is John. The verb is the action: threw. The direct object is what gets action done to it: ball. So, turn your weary eyes back to Poe. Sentence starts “It was” Subject, verb? Maybe. But then we have “I considered, while blah blah blah…” Starts out like we’re talking 'bout the deficiency, but then the bulk of the first half of the thing goes on with all kinds of shit regarding WHEN and HOW and WHAT our narrator is considerating. I looked at this a couple of different ways (at the beginner end of sentence diagramming, it’s got lots of right and wrong answers, but when you get to harder sentences you get to make artistic/explicatory choices when diagramming, depending on what you want to get out of the damn thing) and I finally chose to do the first half of the thing as “I considered” rather than “It was” because of the adverbial info that dominates the predicate-ish part of the first half. Doing it as “I considered” gives you, the diagram-looker-atter, a better idea of what the hell is going on, assuming you have any damn idea of what sentence diagramming is or how it works. (Probably you don’t. Zero fucks are being given, over here. What I do is me–for that I came. Gerard Manly Hopkins, plus also a fantastic piece of clex fanfic regarding corsetry written by seperis and Teland.)
We have “I considered this deficiency” – that’s pretty much the first half of the sentence. The rest is is window-dressing about how and when and what he’s considering. Poe’s trying to give you a sense of our narrator’s reasoning, here, why he’s thinking what he’s thinking. Poe's two points in the first half are “the house and its residents match up pretty well in character” and “I wonder, how much has one (the house) influenced the other (its residents) over the years?”
Here’s the pic for that:
The second half of the sentence, after the dash and after we’ve been fully briefed on what sort of considering our narrator has done, refocuses us upon the deficiency, which is honestly the point of the sentence. We’ve got two adjectival prepositional phrases, of issue and of transmission, modifying 'deficiency’ and then a which-had-identified clause thingie that further illuminates the aforesaid deficiency. It’s a very nested construct and untangling it is more than enough to defeat most Poor Bastards (see intro). Here’s a pic of that one, sorry it’s so tiny but I had a hell of a time getting it to fit on one sheet and honestly I’m not too sure about the “seemed to include both” construct but it’s the best I could do under the circumstances:
Consider, though, the fact that Poe makes you work for the meaning. The meaning isn’t all that… it’s complex but not unknowably so. I get the impression reading this that the text itself is foreboding and overwrought and really, not all that fucking accessible. I mean, yeah, some of the style of the prose is a feature of its age, but Poe has sentences that don’t take a forklift to move around. He can write simply if he wants. (We’ll see some examples later on in this text. I’ll be sure to point 'em out to you.) Here, he don’t wanna. Why is that?
Second half of the sentence is mostly “Since the family tree is sort of a stick, and since the house goes just from father to son over and over, locals in these parts use “The House of Usher” to refer to the people and the house together like they’re one and the same.“ As I said above, he’s pointing out the Li Tra Chure goings on so that you don’t miss out on his mad stylins. Me, I have drawn diagrams of this masterwork of a sentence so that you don’t miss out on MY mad stylin’.
4. I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment–that of looking down within the tarn–had been to deepen the first singular impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition—for why should I not so term it?–served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. And it might have been for this reason only, that, when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy–a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity—an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the grey wall, and the silent tarn–a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.
Reading for meaning, paragraph 4: Man, the house is Still Creepy. And really, thinking on how creepy it is, I’m probably sorta weirding myself out about it.
And obviously, reading for literature purposes, we have a theme thing here. The theme thing is when you start thinking terror, you can kind of whammy yourself by thinking about it. Our narrator says that terror is one of those things that builds and feeds upon itself, spiraling out of control. (Actual line is this: “There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition—for why should I not so term it?–served mainly to accelerate the increase itself.”)
Let’s consider this notion, because it’s something Poe has felt moved to share with us in this narrative. Why is Poe telling us how terror works? Because (a) it’s kinda neat and cool to tell us what the story is gonna do before it does it and (b) it’s even cooler to do so within the story itself and © authors get off on this sort of elegant coolness.
In the literary world, telling you what is gonna happen before it actually happens is called foreshadowing instead of prophecy. You want to be reading onward, dear reader, with the notion of terror building upon itself and spiraling out of control. Madness, I feel moved to note, works the same way. :) And, for advanced students, the action in a story starts slowly and builds in a narrative arc, hopefully getting rather more gripping as it proceeds to a climax (yeah, I’m snickering over here, too)… spiraling out of control, kinda, as well.
Note that our narrator, bless his heart, is careful to tell us that his ever-so-thoughtfully-described case of the creeps is a strange fancy–a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed me. Bae, read that shit. “I got this weird idea, totally out of left field, and I’m only mentioning it to show how freaking weirded out I was.” He might as well just evaluate the bogeyman noise as, "Heck, it was probably just the wind…” and be done with it. It’d be just as convincing…
