Joker Poe, Part 1: Just Diddling
Edgar Allan Poe remains one of the most popular writers in the history of American literature. In the twenty-first century, Poe finds himself at the center of movies, television shows, and internet memes; the very name or image of Poe can be considered “click-bait” on the web. Yet the pop-cultural version of Poe is not a very accurate picture of the man, as a number of Poe scholars (a.k.a. pedantic killjoys) like to point out. Although biographers reveal the man to have been a savvy, business-like, professional magazinist, someone who knew what sold in the literary marketplace and who gave the people what they wanted, most fans prefer to confuse Poe with some of his more memorable protagonists. Many readers envision Poe as a dark, brooding, Gothic madman, a visionary poet obsessed with waking nightmares, horror, and the mysteries beyond the grave. The author of “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Raven” is assumed to be obsessed with premature burials, murder, and death. But what if this is all a ruse? What if, to employ a term that Poe uses with approval, Poe is “diddling” his audience. In Poe and the Subversion of American Literature: Satire, Fantasy, Critique, I argue that Poe is perhaps best viewed as a practical joker, a highly skilled literary prankster whose fundamental talent lay in putting one over on people. More frequently than we care to admit, the victims of these confidence games, these diddles, are us, the readers. While we are thrilled by otherworldly wonders, aghast at inhuman terrors, and in awe of supernal beauty, Poe is grinning.
Although Poe is best known and best loved as a figure of dark romanticism, he was also a humorist. In fact, Poe wrote far more pieces that could be considered humor or satire than those that would be called horror. If his first published tale (“Metzengerstein,” which actually could be viewed as a burlesque) was not intended to be comical, then his second (“The Duc De L’Omelette”) certainly was, and one of the last tales published during Poe’s lifetime, “X-ing a Paragrab,” was a silly little piece lampooning the newspaper or magazine industry itself. As David Galloway has pointed out, “comedies, satires, and hoaxes account for over half of his output of short stories.” (Significantly, Galloway’s observation appears in his introduction to a collection of short stories titled The Other Poe, whose title serves to emphasize the degree to which Poe is not widely known for his comedies and satires.) By numbers alone, one could argue that Poe was primarily a humorist, if sometimes a black humorist, and that his tales of terror or mystery were secondary to the main body of his collected works.
In the Archives: Edgar Allan Faux (1877 then 1845)
They say humor is based on timing. Yes, as is everything else. Ask Elisha Gray about telephone patents. I was plugging along, working on a piece about the comedian Dana Gould, and still figuring out when I would finish writing about Mark Twain and the German language, when an article in my local newspaper caught my attention:
“Dead Poets Society founder visits 300th grave”
The fact that there’s an actual Dead Poets Society prompts visions of Ethan Hawkes’s teeth and an involuntary desire to kill Robert Sean Leonard. Swallowing my bile I learned that the current founder, Walter Skold of Freeport (Maine), has visited the gravesites of 300 poets “ahead of this weekend’s fourth annual Dead Poets Remembrance Day.”
What is “Dead Poets Remembrance Day”? Apparently, “with the help of 13 current and past state poets laureate,” Skold was able to dedicate October 7—“the day that Edgar Allan Poe died and James Whitcomb Riley was born—to heightening public awareness of the art of poetry.
The article posted October 5. That was Saturday. Making the actual memorial day a Monday. Today. My day to submit. So in honor of dead poets everywhere (and as one who writes the occasional verse and considers the artform dead, and therefore all practitioners the undead) let us examine the two poets tied to this day. What the article does not share is an appreciation for not just the day, but the year. On October 7, 1849, as Edgar Allan Poe lay dying of possibly drunken Rabies in a Baltimore medical college, James Whitcomb Riley was borning in Greenfield, Indiana.
Parody: A Lesson
Don and Alleen Nilsen
An essay based on a lesson, the Powerpoint of which can be found (along with many others) here.
In the New Yorker, Wolcott Gibbs wrote that parody is the hardest form of creative writing because the style of the subject must be reproduced in slightly enlarged form, while at the same time holding the interest of people who haven’t read the original. Further complications are posed since it must entertain at the same time that it criticizes and must be written in a style that is not the writer’s own. He concluded that the only thing that would make it more difficult would be to write it in Cantonese.
Obviously, it is easier for people to enjoy a parody if they know what the original was. In our increasingly diverse culture, memories of “classic” children’s books may be one of the few things we have in common. Advertisers, broadcasters, cartoonists, journalists, politicians, bloggers, and everyone else who wants to communicate with large numbers of people, therefore turn to the array of exaggerated characters that we remember from childhood books. Chicken Little represented alarmists; Pinocchio stood for liars;The Big Bad Wolf warned us of danger; Humpty Dumpty demonstrated how easy it is to fall from grace; The Frog Prince gave hope to women of all ages; and Judith Viorst’s The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day lets us know that we all have really bad days.
Some of Lewis Carroll’s parodies were just for fun. When Lewis Carroll wrote a parody of the poem “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star. How I wonder where you are,” it became, “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Bat. How I wonder where you’re at.” This is merely fun word play. But some of Carroll’s parodies had a deeper significance. Lewis Carroll lived in a time when the Victorian poetry tended to be filled with sentimentality and didacticism, so many of Carroll’s poems parodied that sentimentality and didacticism. G. W. Langford wrote a poem that not only preached to parents, but also reminded them of the high mortality rate for young children: “Speak gently to the little child! / It’s love be sure to gain; / Teach it in accents soft and mild; It may not long remain.” Carroll’s parody turned this poem into a song for the Duchess to sing to a piglet wrapped in baby clothes: “Speak roughly to your little boy. And beat him when he sneezes. / He only does it to annoy / Because he knows it teases.” The poem “Against Idleness and Mischief” by Isaac Watts read as follows: “How doth the little busy bee / Improve each shining hour / and gather honey all the day / From every opening flower!” Lewis Carroll’s parody is much more fun, and much less didactic: “How doth the little crocodile / Improve his shining tail / And pour the waters of the Nile / On every golden scale?”
THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING HUMOROUS STORY
Sam Sackett
As Americans pushed west from the Atlantic seaboard, they formed settlements here and there. In those days before radio or television, they established in nearly every settlement what they called “literary societies,” which met once a month at the schoolhouse or church to provide entertainment. In the intervening days the settlers memorized and rehearsed their presentations.
Winter evenings, when it was too snowy to go outside and plow the frozen ground, families often met in one another’s homes for dinner, and after dinner some of them would be called on to deliver the presentations they had given at the last literary society meeting.
These presentations were not short. They lasted several minutes. They might be poems, like “The Wreck of the Hesperus.” They might be songs, like “She’s Only a Rose with a Broken Stem.” They might be literary narratives, like Edward Everett Hale’s “The Man without a Country.” They might be speeches from drama, like Portia’s moving plea from The Merchant of Venice. Sometimes two settlers would go together. Perhaps a man and a woman would team up for the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet; or two men might present the quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius from Julius Caesar or a comic turn, like “The Arkansas Traveler.”
“The Arkansas Traveler” required two men and a fiddle or banjo. The settler is sitting on his porch, playing the first half of the tune which derived its title from the name of the sketch. The traveler arrives. “Farmer, can you tell me the way to Little Rock?” “I don’t know bout no little rock, but there’s a whopper down in my spring branch.” And the settler plays the first half of the tune again. The two men go at it, back and forth several times, a straight line from the traveler which is one-upped by the settler, punctuated by the first half of the tune. Finally the traveler asks the settler why he doesn’t play the second half of the tune. The settler admits he doesn’t know it. The traveler takes the fiddle or banjo and plays the tune through. The settler is so overjoyed to learn the second half of the tune that he invites the traveler for dinner.
Editor’s note: In a post on the Not Even Past website, a blog published by the history department of at the University of Texas, the historian Karl Hagstrom Miller discusses the history of the tune and provides several samples of the tune from the The Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The photo below is from this post.
Another type of literary society presentation was a story the teller had heard somewhere, or even one invented by the teller. Such narratives might be humorous stories of the type that Mark Twain described in “How to Tell a Story.” Twain’s essay most likely deals not only with stories told by one person to another and those told before an audience, but also with stories told in the intimate gathering of a literary society or after dinner at someone’s home. “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” which first brought Twain to national attention, contains a humorous story of the type that might have been told in such a setting.
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Brykman (steve)
Carrie Andersen
Daniel F. Yezbick
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jmcstras
larrybush2013
Matt Powell
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nellylewislambert
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tefriedman
ABE
Humor in America 