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Edgar Allan Poe: America's Spookiest Classic with Fr. Ryan Duns and Steven Knepper · Christians Reading Classics

• 0:03
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• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_02: Tis some visitor, I muttered, tapping at my chamber door, only this and nothing more.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December, and each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_02: Eagerly I wished the morrow.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: Vainly I had sought to borrow.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_02: From my books or cease of sorrow, sorrow for the lost Lenore, for the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore, nameless here, forevermore.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: So wrote Edgar Allan Poe in his most famous poem, The Raven, in 1844.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: It was published the following year.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a podcast from Muir Orthodoxy, where we read old books for the new world.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: I am Nadia Williams, managing editor of Muir Orthodoxy.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Today, it is my privilege to talk about Edgar Allan Poe's spooky fiction and poetry with Steve Knepper and Father Ryan Dunns.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Both of them have thought much about how to read spooky literature specifically as Christians.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: And it is October, after all.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Steve Knepper is professor of English at Virginia Military Institute and a poetry faculty member at Ashland Demet in creative writing.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: He is a widely published poet himself and is the founding editor of New Verse Review, which is a fantastic publication you should be reading if you're not already.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Father Ryan Dunns chairs the Department of Theology at Marquette University.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: He is a Jesuit priest and theologian whose interests lie at the intersection of philosophy and systematic theology.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: His books include Theology of Horror, The Hidden Depths of Popular Films, which explores how horror movies can help us consider deeper theological questions.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you both for being here.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you very much.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: And together we're going to talk today about three of Poe's works: The Raven, and then also two short stories, The Telltale Heart and The Fall of the House of Usher.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: And in the process, we'll consider what makes Poe America's spookiest classic.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I have to ask the first question, which is kind of setting the foundations, but what is a classic anyway?
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm gonna uh borrow a definition from the recently passed Wendell Berry, who is in many ways very different from Poe.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: So he'll probably be mentioned now and left behind, I suspect.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_02: But Wendell Berry once said that classics, great literature, give us permission to take the serious things seriously.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that there are many different legitimate definitions of a classic.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_02: But I like this one especially now because I think a lot of people are really hungering to take the serious things seriously.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that we're gonna live in a time where what it means to be human is more in question than it's ever been before with artificial intelligence and the blending of humans and machines.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that literature is a particularly human way to think about being human.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_02: So I like that definition.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_02: Give us permission to take the serious things seriously.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_03: That's a much better definition than the one I learned in the seventh grade.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_03: And that was the classic is uh what has withstood the test of time.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_03: And I I appreciate that definition because you're like a pebble worn smooth in the water in the waters of a river.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_03: You can return back again and again to these texts, and in their withstanding the text of time, there's something durable about them that uh continues to speak to every generation.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_03: And when we return back to them, in a way, there's an act of retrieval of memory.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_03: We say, Oh, I remember reading this when I was uh 12 and then 24 and then 34 and now 46.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_03: And with each revisitation, there it speaks in a new way.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_03: A new layer of yourself has been uncovered, and that text has continued to uh resonate in history.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_03: So I think the the text that withstands the test of time and has a capacity to speak to subsequent generations uh in new and innovative ways, that's uh I think that's a classic.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: And these are both important aspects of the classics.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: I would say like we need both.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: It shouldn't just be one.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: Just because a text has stood the test of time, that definition, um, I love that definition, but it doesn't quite say why it has withstood the test of time.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I think Barry is getting at that at the why of why some texts become classics and others perhaps do not.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: So here we are in October, and we are talking specifically about spooky classics.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: So let me ask you, what are some notable spooky classics?
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, we're using this highly literary, highbrow term spooky.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_03: There are any any number of good texts.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_03: You know, spooky classics can range from the short stories of Stephen King to Anne Radcliffe to Horace Walpole.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_03: And in I think in October, as now I don't know about where you are at right now.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yesterday it was 83 degrees and sunny in Milwaukee.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_03: So the idea of October as spooky season has gone out the window because it's more like suntan season around here.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_03: Uh so while the leaves are changing, the kids are sunbathing.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_03: I don't get it.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_03: This is totally unnatural for my my Irish uh neopagan skin, I guess.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_03: And but but you get these these these stories themselves having withstood the test of time that draw us into this liminal space where we are forced to question and wonder does the world end at my senses, or is there more to reality than than meets the eye?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_03: And the hint, the the subtle feints, the suggestion that there's more to reality, I think titillates the imagination.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_03: And if that more to reality is not necessarily hospitable to us, it raises a question about the meaning, purpose, and ends of human life.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_03: And I think those are I think those are fun for us to contemplate.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I might add, too, that when we think about the canon of American literature, Poe certainly stands out as perhaps the one we think of as the spookiest, and I think that's a well-deserved title.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: But it's also kind of surprising how much literature in the American canon has a kind of Gothic flavor to it.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, among his own contemporaries, you might think of writers like uh Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: So that's kind of an interesting thing, too.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_02: American literature kind of comes of age with Gothic literature, and uh it's deeply marked by it.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: So, one more definition question before um I ask my next question about spooky classics, but you mentioned Gothic literature, and that's a term to which we'll return, of course, because um Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, especially is a Gothic story.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, what do we mean when we say that?
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: I could I could say something kind of uh smart, Alechie, but not very scholarly.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_02: But I think I'll start with it at least is I think we tend to call uh literature that we think is more literary but spooky, gothic, and literature that we think is less literary but spooky or but um I think that there's more to it than than that.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_02: But I'll I'll I'll throw put that down as a as a starting point.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean I might add too, I think that you know, gothic literature, strictly speaking, you know, has kind of uh histor literary historical roots and contours.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you're thinking about late 18th, early early mid-19th century, then you know, there's certainly you know variations on it later on, but I think that that's a term often a little more anchored in literary history, where horror is a more sort of uh catch-all term.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_02: But even from that angle, you know, thinking of it as more popular to literature, you might think of horror literature as having its roots often in sort of the pulp magazines of the early 20th century or something like that.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, I think that there's a a one can give rigorous definitions of these things, but there's also a little bit of fluidity, and I think it does does often have to do with the prestige of the work under consideration.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think that's a really good way of approaching it.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you could I might I am not a scholar of literature, but I do find the atmospheric or tonal tonal differences between, say, Gothic, you know, Radcliffe, um, Shelley, you know, versus Lovecraft.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_03: You know, we have to we have to remember Lovecraft, our early 20th century uh master of weird fiction uh horror as is something he uh contributes to.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um there is there's just an atmospheric difference in the way the narratives unfold.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_03: I think in glass, and to Steve's point, you know, you you have gothic as it is prestige.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_03: To call something gothic, it has this rarefied, almost elite versus horror fiction, which I I mean as someone who writes on this and uh tries to take horror seriously.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_03: My highbrow colleagues often look down on me like I'm some sort of barbarian, you know, amateur because you know, oh horror, how can that be something serious?
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's a really that is a helpful definition, that distinction between horror and gothic, because I've wondered about this before.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: But and now I'm thinking, yeah, I've never heard Lovecraft referred to as Gothic.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's always horror.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: So, one key question before we turn to Poe in earnest.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I think Father Ryan, this is really right, like what you are thinking about so much.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: Why should Christians specifically read spooky fiction?
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_03: Every Sunday, I say this often to my students, every Sunday, Christians around the world profess to believe in things visible and invisible, things seen and unseen.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that horror fiction, good horror fiction, recomposes us into a narrative milieu where these are questions that are taken seriously, that give us a chance to step back from the vicissitudes of everyday life and to allow the the suggestions that there is more to reality than meets the eye to wash over us.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_03: And so you we don't read horror fiction because we delight in pain, suffering, and torture.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_03: I think part of the the excitement of it is it good horror fiction awakens within us this intellectual, spiritual dynamic about questioning what is the nature of reality, what are the limits of human cognition, what can we really know?
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_03: And if I, as the knower, am not the sovereign center of all creation, if there are forces other than myself, uh more deeply embedded in reality, that speak to, call to, or trying are trying to break into me, how what is my stance towards the real?
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_03: So I think I think metaphysically and theologically, it raises lots of really exciting and fun questions that you might not want to take a course in metaphysics, but you can get into a lot of it if you take horror seriously.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_03: And I think Christians can do that very well.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I think too that I think approaching horror as a Christian kind of has, you know, two pitfalls that one must avoid.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I think, you know, Father Ryan does a really good job of this in his own work, and I've been always struck by this.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_02: Like one pitfall, I think, is just sort of an uh like a very uh puritanical kind of like this is just all bad, so dismiss it.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I think another tendency is just to sort of indiscriminately baptize it and try to, you know, make Lovecraft, who's clearly an atheist, you know, that's that has this you know bleak cosmic vision, trying to sort of look for little little sparks of of of Christianity within that.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: I think that uh you know it's a discerning approach.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that any person of sound mind and character should be discerning about some things that pass for for horror, you know, that border on you know a torture flick or a snuff flick or something like that.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, as Father Ryan suggests, I think that it is if if one of the things, one of the definitions of literature in general, and I'm always pretty wary of saying literature does this, because literature can do so many different things, but if one of the definitions I've always found pretty persuasive is that the literary or the poetic defamiliarizes, that it makes the familiar strange, I think that horror literature and gothic literature are very good at that, and they end up raising questions, yeah, about the nature of reality, getting to sort of look at reality another way.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_02: I will also add a dimension to that that um I think that and maybe this is a difference between one way of thinking about the definition, the difference between gothic and horror as well, is that in gothic, since it has those romantic roots, uh Louis Dupree, the philosopher of religion at Yale, once said that in Romanticism, the eye becomes a question to itself.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_02: The eye becomes a question to itself.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_02: Suddenly the self is surprising, it's mysterious, the world's out there is mysterious, but the self is mysterious too.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_02: And often in horror literature, you can't really tell which is which because the the internal state often gets projected out onto the world, right?
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: Those crumbling mansions in Po, those whirlpools in Po, those are sort of an image of the inner state too, of the disintegration of the inner state.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: But there's also a way in which that they the inner state of the psyche, not the inner state, the road.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_02: I noticed that I just said that in a way that could be confused.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_02: I want to specify.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_02: But it also, I think, often really does make the world out there strange and weird too.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_02: So I think that that's one thing that's interesting about horror literature.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I would even say there's something often deeply Augustinian about horror literature because it does look inside with a sense of awe and kind of terror and a sense that our inner worlds are kind of permeable, permeable, and are themselves kind of uh uh a place uh that's often strange to us when we are in either situations of crisis or when we look deeply inside.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_03: Nadja, if I can offer, I want to build it it's just funny, and I know our listeners can't see us, but this was my morning reading today, Steve.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_03: Like we do we have a way of thinking in parallel tracks.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_03: Um, this was a book by Louis Dupree, um, a series of lectures he gave.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_03: But really quick, you know, one of the things when I teach the theology of horror, or even I'm teaching a course in metaphysics right now, is trying to cultivate within the students a style of reading that in the the world of Ignation and Jesuit spirituality, uh you could call being attentive, being reverent, and being devoted, being attentive to the text or the world on its terms, to accept its reality and its integrity, uh so attentiveness.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, we're so distracted, hyper distracted, but that attitude of take the text uh as it is, not as we want it to be, be reverent.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_03: What is contained and at work within the text?
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_03: How is it animated and dynamized by the author or in a revelatory text by the spirit?
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_03: And then uh how are we called into an act of devotion to in taking it seriously, in recognizing what is other to ourselves that is disclosing itself on its own terms?
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_03: How do we interact with it in a way that seeks to uh respectfully bring out what is true and to serve that truth?
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_03: I think was it Denise Lavertov, the poet is the servant of mystery?
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_03: How do we serve that mystery through acts of self-donation and devotion?
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_03: So it's a style of reading that that I think is very foreign, particularly actually to graduate students and academics, but it's a style that I'm trying to cultivate within students.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_03: But attention, reverence, devotion, and horror is a great workshop to practice this, a spooky laboratory of its of its own.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's a really good argument for reading this seriously.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that brings us to the raven.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: What is going on?
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_02: In some level, I mean, the premise seems so simple, and yet it's anything but Yeah, even in Poe's lifetime, this is the work that had instant success and brought him fame, even notoriety.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_02: I remember reading in in in one Poe biography that little little kids would would run behind him in the street and chant parts of the poem uh when this when this first came out, which is which is an awesome thing to think about.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_02: So this is one that's always I think captivated readers.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's one of those small handfuls of poems, small handful of poems that just permeate popular culture and get referred to all the time.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_02: You can make a reference to it in a TV show and people get it.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I mean I I really do think.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, think of of The Raven, you think of Frost's uh The Road Not Taken, you think of um maybe Langston Hughes Harlem.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there's a very short list of poems that just have recognition uh in the broad reading public.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_02: I mentioned before we started recording that The Simpsons have an episode with a dramatization of the Raven.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_02: It's pretty good.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so the Ravens always had this appeal.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_02: I think there's something hypnotic about the rhymes, about the meter of it.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_02: I think that that's reinforced by this sort of liminal dreamlike state or borderline between sleep and dream of the speaker.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's a great example of a term we often think about more with fiction, but I think works here, is kind of like the unreliable speaker or the unreliable narrator.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_02: So in the very first couple of stanzas that I read at the beginning of the episode, we get kind of this accumulation of factors that could contribute to an unreliability.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's late at night and he's sleepy.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: He's also really on edge.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_02: He's been reading these books of Forgotten Lore, which that sounds pretty creepy.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_02: And uh he's also deep in mourning, he's mourning the loss, he's in deep sorrow, the loss of Lenore, of his apparent lover, or wife, or fiance.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_02: We don't know exactly what the the nature of this romantic relationship was.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_02: So all those together give us a speaker who's in an altered state of a certain kind.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that casts its spell.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_03: I would simply say the thing that always struck me is when the the the just the the way Poe composes the reader into the poem, you know, you have this idea of being in this Closed framework.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_03: The setting of the poem is very small.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_03: It's in one man's chambers, or obviously in the man's chambers, mourning Lenore.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_03: But that self-incl that enclosure within a room, here you have the sense of that not only uh physical crampedness, but also this emotional grief that that weighs so heavily on the heart and leaves him, you know, there's an I find the poem to be a like a protracted ache that is looking for succor or release.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_03: And there's that wonderful line toward the end, one, two, three, four, like five paragraphs, uh, five stanzas uh from the end, you know, respite, respite nepanth from my memories of Lenore, Kwaff or Kwaf, this kind nepanth, and forget this lost Lenore, quoth the Raven, nevermore.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_03: You know, this this this tincture to deliver some form of anti-sorrow, this relief from grief, and that's not forthcoming in the poem.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_03: Like this is something that will rest upon his heart forever.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_03: Ah, sort of the the wound of knowledge of having loved and lost.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that speaks to speaks eloquently and poetically, in a way that uh that resonates generation after generation.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: I went to the University of Virginia as an undergrad, and as you're talking about the chamber where this takes place, obviously this is not the chamber that Poe wrote this in, but I wonder if he was thinking of his room on the lawn, which is a very, you can peek into it today, it's preserved.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it's just a very austere room, just nothing but a bed and a table and chair, and that's it.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like very austere.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: And in the fall, when the leaves turn, you just have that spooky atmosphere.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: You can imagine mist rising from the ground and maybe ravens knocking on doors.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's I'm glad you brought that up.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_02: I was thinking about that this morning.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_02: That another way that we might think of Poe's significance, he's had certainly his literary detractors that see him as immature or just a shock artist.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_02: One of my favorite quotes is from Henry James, who says that an enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so you know, maybe maybe we're primitive.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_02: But uh But in the plus side, any place that has any association with Poe memorializes it.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_02: There's statues of him every place that he's lived.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_02: We've got the Baltimore Ravens.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh you and I both spent much more time on the grounds of UVA than Poe did, but but Poe's room is is preserved.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_02: So so I do think that that's a testament to his significance.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_02: Coming back to the Raven, I think that often in post literature there there's the the sort of ambiguity about the supernatural or more naturalistic we might say reading.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_02: But in in in this one, I think there's that ambiguity, but I think he also invites us to lean more towards that that reading him is unreliable and is sort of in a downward spiral that's almost self-inflicted.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_02: And I love that idea of the ache of grief that Father Ryan suggested, and I think that just names the the mood of this poem and so much Poe so well, and I think that's part of his power as a writer.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_02: But alongside that, I think there's too this almost strange desire to move deeply into more deeply into the grief that the the right that the speaker himself is not even aware of.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_02: So this bird comes in, the only thing it seems to say is nevermore.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_02: And the first thing that the that the narrator or the speaker says is something pretty darn reasonable, at least first.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_02: I'll I'll read a bit.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: Startless is startled at the stillness broken by replies so aptly spoken.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: Doubtless, said I, what it utters is its only stock and store.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_02: So, in other words, you can find great YouTube videos of talking ravens.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: Ravens are super smart.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_02: Our speaker's first assumption is that, well, someone has taught this bird how to say nevermore.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_02: Not a divine or demonic messenger, just a trained bird.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: But then notice what he says immediately after that.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_02: Doubtless said I, what it utters is its only stock and store, caught from some unhappy master, whom unmerciful disaster followed fast and followed faster till his song's one burden bore, till the dirges of his hope that melancholy burden bore of never, nevermore.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_02: And already we see sort of this kind of morbid slant of mind, right?
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think there's a couple different ways you could read the what's going on there, but one way is that instead of thinking that the master just left the cage open on the raven, like the something awful has happened to the master of this bird.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and uh I think that already hints that you know the the speaker's sort of tending in that direction, sort of bending things in that direction.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_02: And what he proceeds to do is ask this series of questions that the last thing he wants to hear at the conscious level is nevermore, right?
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_02: Like, will I see Lenore again?
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: Is there uh a balm for my sorrows?
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_02: Will I get to heaven?
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_02: You know, and the bird only says the one word that he knew from the beginning, nevermore.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_02: So it's almost like this self-inflicted downward spiral as he asks the bird these questions that undo him.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I think that's very powerful.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_02: And another thing that Poe is especially attuned to is this kind of self-destructive element that we're maybe not even aware of that can plague us.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_03: Steve puts his finger on so many good points.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_03: And what I love, if you think this is almost a self-elected self-destruction, at you know, just below, but the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling straight.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_03: I wield a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door, then upon the velvet sinking I betook myself to linking, fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of your what this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of your meant and croaking nevermore.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_03: He's attentive, he recognizes this bird, it says one word, and he now places himself before it, and he the entire horizon of his world, already in a cramped space, now narrows down to figuring out beguiled or bewitched, perhaps.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_03: Uh what what is this?
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_03: Is it what is it an omen?
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_03: Uh but as he f fixates on it, as he beholds it, it's drawing him deeper and deeper into a downward spiral that you know if if the Christian icon draws us into an infinite mystery that is that re knit us into a sense of integrity and whole, this is now causing his like a form of decompensation in the form of uh you know dissolution.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_03: So it's the it's anti-iconic in its own the bird is anti-icon.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I mentioned before that Poe loves a good whirlpool or maelstrom.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_02: We don't have one in our stories that we're reading today, but it shows up in a lot of his fiction that has anything to do with the sea or water.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that that's a great image of kind of dissolution for him.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I think that the Raven, even though it doesn't have a literal whirlpool, it has kind of that whirlpool structure as the narrator sort of destroys himself with this line of questioning.
• 30:15
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• 30:21
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• 30:29
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• 30:40
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• 30:58
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• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: And you can find that link in the show notes.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: So as we focus in on the narrator, we see someone who is giving himself up to forces unknown, perhaps.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and and sort of forces unknown even within himself, right?
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_02: There's um there's I think a lack of awareness on the narrator of what he's doing to himself.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you're playing it even within the narrator, there's a sense of am I playing in the realm of the natural, the work-aday world that I'm so familiar with, or is there something supernatural?
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_03: And I I don't think, and this is a Dupre insight, it doesn't mean that there are two radically separate orders of reality that one has to toggle back and forth between.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_03: But our me like that there are natural means of accessing the world around us, and there are supernatural means of accessing a in this case, perhaps, it is yes, it could be a raven trained to say but one word, or it could be the supernatural means of invitation uh you know, an avatar, a harbinger, uh, an emissary of another realm, another force, through that nevermore, that invites him into a different mode of life, a different level of attentiveness or beholding.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so you're but since it's not neatly resolved, it leaves us uh beautifully, and I think where horror is great um as a as a genre, unsettled.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_03: It's not trying to resolve anything for us, it unsettles what is so easily sedimented.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_03: And and there's something beautiful about that.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_02: There is and I would say too that the the speaker has this moment where he thinks that there's there is some intuition about uh or or perception of something strange happening in the room.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_02: And that's the that's the hinge where he begun begins this line of questioning.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_02: He says, Then methought the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen sensor, swung by angels who faint footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_02: Wretch, I cried, thy God hath lent thee.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_02: By these angels he hath sent thee.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_02: Respite, respite and appent thee from thine memories of Lapult Lanor.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, he has this moment where he's like, Whoa, suddenly things got really weird in here, and that's when he changes his view of the raven.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_02: Now I think that uh, you know We we can ask all kinds of questions about how accurate that that read on the situation is, but I think it's to Father Ryan's point that the poem leaves it kind of ambiguous as to what's what's going on.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um exactly just like the raven at the end, you know, will never leave him, it says, you know, which is you know, if you wanted to take a uh a more um kind of supernatural reading of the bird, that's a line I think you might focus on.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_02: But of course the bird can also be kind of like a an avatar of his grief, just like a symbol of the grief, right, that's never gonna leave him and has descended on him.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_03: And you would Steve, and maybe you find this with your students today.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_03: What I you this this poem, and now I'm thinking when I when we come back after the fall break, I will be I have to teach this to the metaphysics class, if for no other reason than a trait I find among students is that they want everything with a bow on it.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_03: They want it tied down.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_03: What does it mean?
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_03: And they have this weird uh rage for this univocity.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_03: Like, tell me in one voice, I just want everything sorted out.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_03: But metaphor, illusion, symbol, allegory, parable just freak them out because it it requires them to put some of their imaginative skin in the game.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_03: And I think this poem you could take in so many different directions and in so many uh interpretive strategies that it sort of defies their their intuitions that they want, you know, everything uh taped down.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and one last thing I might say about the poem is that listeners should look up the Gustave Dore illustrations for it, uh, because they're fantastic.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_02: And they actually are are so thematically rich.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_02: So that idea of the raven is kind of an anti-icon.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_02: There's a great one of the raven on the windowsill with its arms outspread and it's like creating a shadow, so it looks kind of like an upside-down cross on the side of the of the building.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_02: It's uh those are really good illustrations.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: So moving to a rather different text by Poe, The Telltale Heart.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a short story, and it's a really that was uh it's a it's not even just spooky, it's pure evil.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: Like you have this sense of being in the presence of pure evil.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, let's talk about it.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_02: I'll give this one to Steve.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_02: Uh one of the things I like to point out, so we have again, and and we're in prose now, and we have an unreliable narrator who from the very beginning we have good reason to not trust.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the main reasons for that is that my students almost always say, I'll ask them, why does he kill the old man?
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_02: And they'll say, Well, it's his eye.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_02: But even if you if you read the story closely, it's only in this retelling that the narrator says, I think, I think it was his eye.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_02: And then from there, from that hesitation, he spins this whole thing about the eye having to be open each night, or you know, the about the opening or closing of the eye each night and how significant that is for his murder plans.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_02: But it seems like at the very beginning of the story, he's saying he's just now figuring out the eye maybe had something to do with it.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_02: So this is a really unreliable parraider.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_02: And it really leaves unrevolved unresolved why he killed this old man who, by his own admission, was kind to him, treated him as a son.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_03: I was reading recently in the in my I don't know what you read early in the morning.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_03: Some people have devotionals.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_03: I've I've been reading Julia Christeva, uh, The Power of Horror, powers of horror.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_03: And you for her, the ab the abject is the intrusion of death into life.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_03: And that that I whether that is the precipitating cause of everything, but this I the eye is meant to be nimble and lit and and uh functional, but this kind of uh cataract, dead, unseeing eye that's that uh that observes without seeing is that this it's an eruption into this narrator's world, and it through it becomes the an abscess of fixation uh uh in its own way, whether that again is the cause of the problem, but it's something that you fix, you know, that there's the that's the image that always sticks with me, this uh uh unseeing eye or like or this uh deformed eye that just that causes a freakout.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: And for listeners who have not read this story, it's very short.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um it is uh it actually reminds me of Dostoevsky's crime and punishment, but you have this uh the narrator who um just killed an old man.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so like he's he's telling us his whole thought process, which is very, as Steve just noted, very uh unreliable and very unpredictable and strange.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_00: And there's something really spooky about it, but also just the sense of spooky that is almost demonic.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and and and fun uh fun fact, Dostoevsky really liked Poe and uh introduced a couple translations of Poe for a magazine in in Russia.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's interesting, Poe is a mixed bag with other prominent American writers.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_02: Some are his champions, many are his detractors.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_02: But with some of the great international writers, you know, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Poe is so important to them.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so that's that's an interesting thing.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_02: Or or I shouldn't say so important, so important to Baudelaire.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_02: I think less important to Dostoevsky, but he certainly had an enthusiasm for him.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_02: He thought he was uh a great writer in ways.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that connection to crime and punishment suggests maybe some of the things that he saw, saw in Poe.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I think this narrator too is interesting because he's the the structure of the story, it's like who's he talking to here?
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_02: You know, he's talking, he's kind of giving a confession um of sorts.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_02: And I want to read a passage from an essay on Poe by Marilyn Robinson, you know, a great contemporary Christian writer.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_02: She says, Poe's great tales turn on guilt concealed or denied, then abruptly and shockingly exposed.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_02: So that's an interesting thing, right?
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_02: Because in this story, that fits the pattern perfectly.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_02: The narrator gets away with the murder.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_02: He's buried the corpse under the floorboards, the investigators come over, he seems to be putting them at ease, but then for whatever reason, he thinks he hears this heart beating, even though the uh investigators don't seem to hear anything.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_02: He thinks they're just mocking him by not paying attention to this, you know, thumping heart sound.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_02: But, you know, again, as you know, reading him as an unreliable narrator, you know, we might think as is at his own heart as he gets excited, or is this kind of his guilt or his paranoia, sort of being displaced onto the sound of the heartbeat?
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_02: But then he ultimately he can't stand it.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_02: And he tears, he says, you know, the the body's down there, tear up the floorboards.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_02: He he kind of confesses.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so Robinson, I think, makes a good point that often in Poe's stories, even though he's been read as a moral and a moralist, and even by his own aesthetics, he's much more interested in the effect.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_02: But often in his work, uh a crime is revealed.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_02: So I want to read a little more of her passage.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_02: Poe has always been reviled or celebrated for the absence of moral content in his work, despite the fact that these tales are all straightforward moral parables.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_02: For writers so intrigued by the operations of the mind as Poe was, an interest in conscience leads to an interest in concealment and self-deception, things that are secretive and highly individual and at the same time so universal that they shape civilizations.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_02: In Pym and After It, Poe explores the thought that reality is a kind to is of a kind to break through the enthralling dream of innocence or of effective concealment and confront us, horrify us with the truth.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's really interesting because self-examination, self-delusion, and confession are so central to Poe.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I would quibble with Marilyn Robinson a little bit, because I think in The Telltale Heart, we have two different confessions.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_02: We have the confession with on the scene of the crime when he confesses to the police, but then we have this confession that is the story itself, the retelling to whoever he's speaking to.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_02: And in that retelling, I'm not sure we have any indication really of guilt.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_02: Instead, what we have is we have him using these words to describe his actions that are, you know, words like stealthily, wisely, sagacity.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, he basically says, you reader couldn't do this.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_02: Only someone as brilliant as I could do this.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_02: And he's getting more excited as he's telling it.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_02: So it seems like the confession might be motivated here by bragging and by reliving the thrill.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_02: So I mean, again, I think this is one of the places where I think there's a really interesting conversation to be had with Poe from the perspective of a Christian about the dangers of self-con self-deception, the need for self-examination, the deep urge for confession.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_02: But also Poe shows us, well, there are urges for confession that are not that are not healing and they might themselves be demonic.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so, you know, I think one of the things that emerges from this in a lot of horror fiction is that as much as it gets sort of derided as being neurotic, and can take those forms, but the Christian forms of self examination, of discernment of spirit.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: To use a good Ignatian term, and of confession, are meant to sort of channel these things in positive and healthy ways that lead to spiritual and uh psychological and moral flourishing.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_03: You one of the things is I I I was when I reread this the other night, I I was made mindful of the Jesuit thinker, 20th century Jesuit classicist and philosopher William Lynch.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_03: And in his book, Images of Hope, he uh advances the idea of the absolutizing instinct, which is the human tendency to turn apart into the the whole, which if if you just play on social media a little bit when things go viral, especially offensive things, it's one act that becomes the all-encompassing horizon of the offender's life.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_03: But here you take the part, this at least at the beginning, this uh you know, cataract eye of this filmy eye that becomes the whole that you know that leads to his resolution, I will kill him.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I did it which I find so like it it because it doesn't fit into the world or it's it stands out in an awkward or uh bizarre way, you know, it's in a in a way you could read this as an enactment of Jesus' admonition, take the log out from your own eye before you take the criticize the moat in someone else's.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_03: He's criticizing the moat, but here he is himself burdened with uh this log that occludes his own perception of the wor of the real.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the self-delusion is so deep.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, all he's interested in is is self-justification in in this story, at least as far as we can see.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_00: So the comp the competing senses of like guilt that he keeps hearing that heart, but at the same time expressing absolutely no remorse and explaining, like, well, I had to do this.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and so yeah, I think that's exactly right.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_02: And if we see guilt in the story, it's not from anything he explicitly says, it's maybe from that heartbeat that he hears.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um again, it's sort of the repressed guilt that sort of bubbles out as the heartbeat.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_02: But that heartbeat could also be the paranoia, right, that that seems to plague him as well.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_03: It you know, it's at the the end of the second paragraph, and if you want, I think the genealogy of most sin.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_03: We are familiar with crimes of passion thing, you know, like the one-off sudden act, but but this seems more genealogical and archaeological.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and so by degrees, very gradually, I made up my mind to take the life of the old man and thus rid myself of the eye forever.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_03: It's this it's it's the slow process of self-justification and self-deception because I am concealing the truth from myself.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_03: I am now able to justify my that untruth by actions.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_03: And so little by little, incrementally, what starts as, well, it's just a paperclip, can become grand larceny and ultimately a felony and a prison conviction.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_03: Um, because we move toward it slowly.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, but that's that's the the icy tentacles of sin that wrap around our heart, very seldom seizing it in a one-off moment, but it's a it it lures us in, and we are beguiled into thinking that we're in control the whole time.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_00: So, what was Poe's own theological kind of position?
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_02: Very, you know, I think very hard to pin down.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um and he was a controversial person in his day.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_02: So he had his detractors and his like after his death, like one of the first like biographical notices of his death was like a it job written by an enemy.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so Poe, you know, Poe was a reviewer.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_02: That's one of the main ways that he paid his bills, and he was a vicious reviewer, so he made a lot of enemies.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, his stories were were challenging, and a lot of people thought they were immoral.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_02: So there was kind of a fighting back and forth of whether, you know, Poe was really immoral, or he's really a good guy, even whether he was religious or not.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_02: I think his own beliefs are hard to pin down.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think that anyone could make a case based on his writings that he's any kind of conventional Christian or orthodox Christian, though I do think that there is this kind of Augustinian strand in him that that comes out a lot in those dynamics of self-examination and of um habituation of sin and the you know the curve the curving away that is evolved in sort of sin.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um he he has another story, the black cat, and another story called The Imp of the Perverse, where he talks about this notion of perverseness, where he thinks that we have this drive inside of ourselves to do what we know is wrong in some sort of irrational way.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_02: And Poe with classic hyperbole is like no one in philosophy or literature or theology has come up with this idea before me, even though it's one of the basic faculties of the human person, this this urge to spite ourselves.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_02: And well, anyone that's read Augustine's confessions, including Poe, might think of stealing the pears, right?
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_02: And August Augustine's own sense of bafflement at why he did that.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um or Saint Paul, who has very similar things to say, right?
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_02: So it's like for all 19th-century American writers, there's a lot of Christianity under the tank for Poe.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_02: But his great work, and again, he he seemed to present it very earnestly of cosmology was this late poem called Eureka, which is a wild poem that describes the formation of the universe in a way that's anticipates the Big Bang almost in kind of an incredible way.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but he describes God there as the author of kind of a poetic universe.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so the the god is he's kind of an artist god, um that humans have their individuality, but then sort of are absorbed back into sort of the collective of this artist god for him.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_02: So there's uh people have seen him as some sort of like Gnostic.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_02: There's there's definitely a lot of kind of more speculative romantic religious elements floating around in in that poem.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_02: But uh, I think it's pretty hard to pin down exactly where he stood on religious matters.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_02: He did spend a lot of time with the Jesuits at Fordham, whom he lived nearby.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but one of Poe's detractors said that he liked the Jesuits because they had really good wine and are good at playing cards and never talk about religion.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um so uh but again, as I say, that was so many, yeah.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_02: Here we go.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_02: Father Ryan's holding up a bottle of wine.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um looks like a good bottle.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_02: But uh but again, people that was trying to slander Poe, uh, probably with the the very rampant anti-Catholicism of the time that any association with a Catholic priest is suspect.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um but yeah, it's it's you know, we don't there are a lot of things we don't know about Poe's life.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_03: I have nothing to add to that.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_03: I know.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_03: Steve, that was so good.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_00: That was.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_00: And this brings us to our final story for this uh for this conversation: the very gothic fall of the house of Usher.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_03: I will just start again, I will leave it to Steve to talk all things literary.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_03: This is his his world.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_03: I love teaching the story.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_03: I love it for a host of reasons, because the again, the stud uh my students seldom under make heads or tails of it.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of them have read it in high school, and now I get them three or four years later, uh, and they they come in with these weird, accreted ideas of what the story is supposed to be about, but drawing them more deeply into it, and I foreground the poem.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_03: So we teach the haunted palace at the beginning, it's read in the middle, and then we revisit it at the end, sort of like the summary synthesis of of the story.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_03: You know, to to to your point about Gothic, you know, it it never ceases to amaze me.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_03: Uh you have Horace Walpole in 1764 who writes The Castle of La Toronto, and then only two decades later, Immanuel Kant, what is enlightenment?
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_03: And he's really extolling the high noon of reason that casts away superstition and shadows, and everything will be made clear and apparent.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_03: But that that enlightenment confidence is taking place at the at just at the moment and the birth of this other form of of narration and storytelling that is the exact opposite of what Kant thinks is going to take hold over the world.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_03: And for as as Lot is, what is enlightenment and that movement is the the shadow of the gothic and then horror has never abated.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_03: That sure the the the high noon of reason may ascend, but it still casts shadow, and we find solace in that shadow.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that's one way you can read uh the haunted palace is almost as a critique of Kant's confidence in the enlightenment and in the in enlightenment reason.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_02: That's a great reading of that.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_02: The the poem within the story is a big part of the fall of the house of Usher.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think that Father Ryan's reading is much more sophisticated than the one that I often try to get my students to realize in class, which is that the palace looks like a face, right?
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_02: It has golden banners and these windows-like eyes, and uh, you know, the drawbridge that looks like a mouth and teeth, um, or porticlis, I guess.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and you know, part of what he explores in this story is this double meaning of house, right?
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_02: House is in the sense of an aristocratic family, house is in the sense of this crumbling mansion.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_02: And again, that classic gothic move of externalizing the internal and and internalizing the external, right?
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_02: There's this porosity between the two, often in gothic fiction.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_02: The house reflects the decayed state of the family, and when the last usher dies at the end, uh the house collapses, right?
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_02: And it it raises this question about um yeah, the the link between our psyche and our surroundings in uh you know a dramatic way, but in a way that I think is really intriguing too.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the sort of less uh extreme version of that might be something like you know, Heidegger's idea that a mood isn't something that uh just is an internal state, it's kind of like a habituation or it's like an attunement, a set of set of glasses almost through which we see different aspects of the world.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_02: So the world discloses to us in different ways depending on our mood.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_02: And some of that might be distortion, but often it's not.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_02: Often it's you know, uh you're seeing different aspects of reality.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so again, I mean, those are some Kantian sort of concerns bubbling under the surface.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_02: But again, you know, coming back to the idea that our our our protagonists in Poe are often even scarier or more messed up than we realize.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_02: One thing that's different about this story than most Poe stories is in most post stories, it would be Roderick Usher that tells the tale.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's the it's the disturbed character who commits the crime, who often speaks in Poe.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_02: But here we have this friend who tells the story as kind of a slightly at first slightly confused, then increasingly freaked out observer of these family dynamics.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_02: But if you read the the poem closely, you know, it sort of hinges on Madeline Usher, Roderick Usher's sister, who's seemingly died and he's buried her.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_02: But then it turns out with his superheroing, which is something else that Poe loves, he loves the idea of superheroes.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um he realizes that she's actually been buried alive, but he doesn't go down and free her from the crypt.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_02: And then eventually she breaks out somehow, even though it's really fortified.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_02: And at the very end of the story, she collapses on him and he dies, and then the house tumbles down as the narrator runs out of it.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's a it's a great crescendoing finish.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_02: But if you go back once you know the whole story and you read this description of Roderick Usher's painting, uh, which this is, you know, even before she gets buried alive.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_02: Let me see if I can find this.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_02: One of the phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend, partaking not so rigidly of the spirit of abstraction, may be shattered forth, although feebly in words.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_02: A small picture presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_02: Certain accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_02: No outlet was observed in any proportion and any portion of its vast extent, and no torch or other artificial source of light was discernible, yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout and bathed the hole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that painting sounds an awful let lock like the vault in which Madeline Usher is going to be interred alive.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_02: And he's painting it already, right?
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_02: So there's this question of like what is going on with this guy?
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_02: He's he's pretty messed up.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_02: Now it's possible he's anticipating his own death and burial in that family vault.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_02: He seems to be obsessed with the notion of death.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, that that painting raises all kinds of weird questions about what's going on between Roderick and and Madeline and whether there's something even more kind of malicious and murderous at play.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_03: It was Steve, something you mentioned the Jesuits with Poe, and this is sparked just a thought.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_03: If you think of the 19th century, Poe is the the the first half of the century, and then in 1844, you have Gerard Manley Hopkins born.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_03: So there's five years' overlap, and then basically toward the end of the 19th century.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_03: But think of the the radically different worldviews for Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit poet.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_03: You have God present and at work in all things.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, the grandeur of God, yes, harm and harvest, Kingfisher's Catch Fire, all of these, the Wind Hover, these are all beautiful poems.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_03: And he too has his dark moments, you know, the terrible sonnets and such.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_03: But think of this.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_03: So there you have a world where the center of all gravity is in a creation that that mediates an encounter, that God is present in the created effects of creation.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_03: And then you get uh the narrator talking about spending time playing music and doing art with with uh Roderick.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_03: He writes, and thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe in one unceasing radiation of gloom.
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_03: You know, this is anti-sacramental.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_03: The key the center of gravity is located in this tortured, spiraling, uh sucked into the whirlpool of self-destruction, self-deception, and he's belching forth this miasmic uh patina of gloom on all things.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_03: He's toxic.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_03: What a total difference of worldview uh from from say uh a Hopkins.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_03: It's a different metaphysic.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_03: It's I think there's there you could play a lot with that.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, be careful of your friends, right?
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_02: That's one of the lessons of Poe, right?
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_02: They might murder you in your sleep or wall you into a into a crypt or just infect your soul with their miasmic darkness.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's such a great passage.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_02: And I never really thought about that passage before.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_02: It makes me think of a passage in Dante that's always struck me of like this, you know, sometimes it's translated as a sullen, who are buried under mud and because and they see out from underneath mud because in their life they couldn't see the good in anything, right?
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_02: They're they had this uh uh kind of figurative mud that obscured their vision of the good everywhere.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_02: They looked on everything with a jaundiced eye.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_02: Well, this is the much more extreme version of that, right?
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_02: It's like it's like something out of stranger things that he's like spreading out corruption as he as the story goes on.
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, the that corrosive corruptive, but but this goes back to Heidegger in, I mean, you could Heidegger in mood.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_03: He is the Stimmung, this weird resonance point for within the story, and it radiates out from him.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, where is the is the decay from the outer the the edifice of the building inward, the cracks of the face, or is it this is the corruption and corrosiveness of the human condition that is uh radiating outwards and being reflected in the still waters of the pool of the of the little lake?
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um in that passage also makes me think differently about the very start of the story when the narrator is kind of riding up to the house of Usher and he looks at the the structure and he's like, this is a this is a dismal structure, and he insists on there is no hint of the sublime in this, right?
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_02: And in you know, gothic sublime, it's all about okay, it's kind of spooky, but there's this strange allure to it.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_02: And I've always thought, oh, that's Poe just being a great manipulator of his reader by telling us it's not sublime.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_02: We as readers, like, oh man, I can't wait to get inside of that house, right?
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_02: It sort of like amps up the sublime.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_02: But now you make me see that there's actually a much deeper and more disturbing thematic at work, right?
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_02: That it's like this isn't an experience of the sublime in the House of Usher, ultimately, is what he's trying to describe.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_02: He's describing something like just this uh vampiric draining away of goodness.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_00: But it's destroyed at the end.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that's kind of there is this sense of cosmic justice in each of the stories.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think that's Marilyn Robinson's point.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_02: And um, and I think it is one that's not very remarked upon.
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_02: So I think that that's that's interesting, right?
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's an interesting article by her, even though I want to quibble with her notion of how confession always shows up with Poe.
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_02: Though I I think that's no, it's hard to read Poe and not think that that guilt is guilt and the need to confess are are are very central things in his works.
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you both so much, Steve, Father Ryan.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, as we reach our conclusion um to this conversation, I want to ask you one final question, um, which perhaps will be a tricky, difficult one, but what spooky classic do you wish you had written and why?
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_03: That is tough.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_03: That is a tough one.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_03: That's brutal.
• 1:05:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_03: I've been asked questions like, well, if you could have written any short story or any piece of fiction, but a spooky classic, um I'll I'll go, I'll go first since you asked you put me on the spot.
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_02: This answer will, I think, surprise no one that knows me very well.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_02: But uh I'll I'll say uh The Witch of Coos by Robert Frost, which is a great spooky poem.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it would need to be a poem for me.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_02: And uh I've tried my hand at writing spooky narrative poems.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_02: I try to write about one a year around this time, but uh haven't matched Frost and probably never will.
• 1:05:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's a good plug for uh new verse review Halloween mini issue that comes out every year today.
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, okay, perfect.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_03: I think it would have to be the legend of Sleepy Hollow.
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_03: Ah that if you know I I remember, yeah, me, I don't know if I don't know did I know the story from the Disney cartoon, or did I know the story and then found the Disney cartoon?
• 1:06:12
  SPEAKER_03: But it's in the probably the deepest recesses of my imagination.
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_03: But regardless, it it it gives you that sense of claustrophobia, of the of the chase, of terror, of unresolvedness, the ambiguity that makes you wonder are we alone in this cosmos?
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_03: Are there forces beyond ourselves in our comprehension that are at work?
• 1:06:34
  SPEAKER_03: And that I mean maybe my vocation as a teacher was inspired by that with the my own the oath Eros Thanatos drive to death by being killed on a bridge.
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_03: Um but we'll see.
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_03: But I think, yeah, I think I think that's just that's that's a pure classic for me.
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's it, that is a great one.
• 1:07:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you both so much.
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much.