The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science - John Tresch
Published in 2021 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY
434 pages
ISBN: 9780374247850
LCCN: 2020058350
LCC: PS2631 .T74 2021
In the wide array of 19th-century American authors, there is perhaps no one more prolific and widely-read among horror fans than Edgar Allen Poe. Although mostly recognized as a literary critic during his lifetime, Poe and his prodigious literary output have served as an inspiration for horror writers and fans of the macabre across the world over the past two centuries. Poe utilized the tragic aspects of his life and tapped into the darker aspects of the human psyche, producing famous short stories such as The Tell-Tale Heart and dark poetry including The Raven. The Dark Romantic underpinnings of these texts delve into the most taboo and morbid corners of humanity and expose a darkly psychological understanding of the human subject. In my angst-ridden teenage years, I consumed as much of Poe’s literature as I could find, pouring over works such as The Murders of the Rue Morgue, The Cask of Amontillado, The Masque of the Red Death, and, my personal favorite, The Fall of the House of Usher (soon to be adapted into a Netflix series by Mike Flanagan).
Indeed, while many of us know Poe for his macabre tales, detective fiction, and dark poetry that were fueled by a life marked by tragedy, few of us recognize his lesser-known scientific endeavors. Even many avid Poe fans may be surprised to discover that in addition to his literary pursuits, Poe was also deeply fascinated with the burgeoning field of science in early 19th century America and wrote texts exploring the intersections of cosmology, psychology, and philosophy. Most confounding of these texts is his Eureka: A Prose Poem, in which Poe explores the nature of God and humanity’s place in the cosmos. Indeed, the era of American history in which Poe lived was saturated in scientific inquiry and discovery, and these developments undoubtedly affected his fiction. Yet, Poe’s affinity for scientific pursuits has been a sorely understudied subject. In his 2021 book, The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science, John Tresch provides a new biography of Poe that pulls the weird and quarrelsome world of the early 19th century American science that surrounded him into greater focus.
Overview:
Recounting the tragic and sordid details of Poe’s life in parallel with the developing world of scientific inquiry and progress of the early 19th century, Tresch argues that Poe’s work must be viewed in light of his interest in science. Tresch makes the case that, far from having a mere amateur interest in the subject, Poe was deeply influenced by and contributed to the burgeoning field of science. Thus, in addition to his legacy as a short story writer and poet, Tresch argues that Poe should also be considered as a serious and important scientific figure.
To support this thesis, Tresch follows the life of Poe and focuses on how the tumultuous world of 19th-century science informed his literary output. Surrounded by a scientific community mired in mesmerism, seances, patent medicines, hoaxes, and phrenology, Poe included these concepts into his works of literary fiction. Tresch not only traces the tragic life of Poe, but also the slowly developing professionalization of science as various associations and groups began to emerge. As discoveries and trends within early 19th-century science emerged, Tresch shows that Poe’s writings also parallel these developments.
For example, when biological taxonomy was taking off in the world of science, Poe translated, organized, and wrote the introduction and conclusion to a book on the classification of seashells, titled The Conchologist's First Book. Additionally, the bunk science of phenomenology (classifying skull shapes to explain behavior) is also featured extensively in his works, as Poe was drawn to a variety of means of understanding the human psyche. He also held a lifelong interest in cryptography and puzzles, which also feature prominently in his work. The most salient of these examples is his creation of the modern detective novel and the utilization of ratiocination in The Murders in the Rue Morgue, in which a person uses observation and logical reasoning to solve a case (a format that would later be popularized by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series).
Yet, Poe’s relationship to the science of his time was not always an amicable one. While Poe often made many enemies in the literary scenes of New York and Boston by writing hatchet job reviews and getting into verbal squabbles with writers, poets, and journalists, he also often went against the grain in his scientific explorations and found himself in the middle of feuds within the scientific community as well. While he would often work to debunk the hoaxes of his day, he was also not above perpetuating a few hoaxes of his own, such as “The Balloon-Hoax”, or his attempt to pass off the publication of his only novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket as a true account of Arctic exploration (although one could argue that Poe was simply satirizing the genre of travel literature). As Tresch recounts Poe’s tormented life of constantly losing the women in his life to consumption and his struggles with alcoholism, he also presents Poe’s final lectures on scientific topics as the culmination of his life’s work. Poe hoped that these lectures would help bring him renewed success similar to his popularly acclaimed poem, The Raven, although they were cut short by his tragic and mysterious death.
These final lectures center around one of Poe’s strangest and most understudied works: a piece of speculative science titled Eureka: A Prose Poem. It is a wild and almost esoteric text that explores the relationship between the Divine and the nature of the universe. For Poe, the universe is constantly in flux, expanding from and contracting into a singularity. Attempting to solve Olber’s paradox (if the universe is infinite, there would be an infinite amount of stars whose light would fill the night sky), Poe argued that the universe was finite and had a beginning, a claim that would later be accepted by 21st physicists.
According to Tresch, Eureka was Poe’s attempt at constructing a natural theology, as he “sought to reconcile chaos with divine providence and design” (310). For Poe, God was not just a Creator of the universe, but also its entire substance, as the cosmos and the Divine are one. Taking this pantheistic view and adding a dash of Epicureanism, Poe also harshly criticized what he saw as the narrow-mindedness of contemporary science. Going against the grain of scientific empiricism and professionalization, Poe sought “for a unified system of causes for all of nature” (312) and “affirmed disorder and destruction at the core of existence” (317).
Yet, while Eureka was praised as a beautiful and daring piece by some scientists, it was generally panned by theologians and ignored by the wider public. Although Poe summoned another set of lectures to try to drum up support for his new, but failing literary magazine venture named The Stylus, he was to be found drunk and delirious in the streets of Baltimore on October 3rd, 1849. He was found in a half-naked stupor, wearing ill-fitted clothes and muttering drunken, incoherent sentences. Four days later, he died, and his corpse was quickly and quietly buried in the presence of about half a dozen onlookers.
After his death, in a bizarre twist, one of Poe’s greatest literary enemies, Rufus Griswold, had become Poe’s literary executor. Griswold wrote a deeply disrespectful and unflattering obituary of Poe in an attempt to assassinate his character and tarnish his legacy. These falsehoods -- such as claiming that Poe had no friends and was “morally bankrupt, perpetually drunk, ruthless, coarse, and generally low of character” (335) -- took nearly a century to overturn. In the mid-20th century, a renewed interest in Poe’s more obscure works emerged, and he began to be considered as a serious scientific thinker, along with his grand achievements in the field of literature. These thinkers, along with Tresch, believe that Poe’s radical insights -- while not backed with empirical data -- predated and foreshadowed later developments and discoveries in the field of cosmology and physics. Ultimately, Poe sought to understand -- through science, art, and intuition -- what it means to be a human being in a chaotic, divine world and where we belong in its grand design.
Commendations:
When writing a biography of Edgar Allen Poe, it's easy to feel daunted and overwhelmed by the sheer amount of literature that has already been written about him. As an enormous presence in the history of American literature, Poe has been the subject of so many books, articles, documentaries, and films, that it can be difficult to find a new angle in which to approach his life. Despite this difficulty, Tresch manages to bring a wide array of fascinating insights into Poe’s life by placing him in the greater context of the scientific discourses of the era. Tresch manages to neatly balance the sordid and tragic details of Poe’s life alongside his vast accomplishments and contributions to the fields of literature and science. Tresch presents Poe as a brilliant and complicated figure, and neither deifies nor casts dispersions on his character (Tresch goes so far as to defend Poe ardently against Griswold’s claims). Even if you’ve read other biographies of Poe or generally know the story of his life, I can almost guarantee that you will find something new and unexpected in this illuminating volume.
Tresch deftly weaves together biographical narrative, history of science, and the social and intellectual context of early-mid 19th century America. Tresch also makes sure to consistently comment on his society’s view on race, class, gender, and other social issues, placing Poe’s views and actions into greater context without ever excusing his excesses. Tresch’s prose is also quite beautiful and imminently readable, as he chronologically intersperses details of Poe’s short life and prodigious work alongside the development and progress of science. This made for a surprisingly quick and accessible read, and a great entry point for anyone interested in either Poe’s life, the history of science, or the culture of the magazine and newspaper industry in the Antebellum Period.
Critique:
On the other hand, since the book is trying to balance several narratives at once, it often seems like a bifurcated book that doesn’t always seamlessly connect. While Tresch provides a brilliantly recounted narrative of both Poe’s life and the emergence of modern science in early 19th century America, these two threads are often much more loosely connected than Tresch might lead us to believe. While Poe did study engineering and mathematics during his time at West Point and reviewed several books and scientific articles while working at various magazines, the inclusion of science in his work seems to be more the work of a passionate hobbyist and masterful marketing genius rather than a fully-committed and rigorous scientific mind.
For example, it is clear that Poe was undoubtedly fascinated with scientific discoveries and, in his youth, wrote “Sonnet -- to Science.” Against the traditional, Romantic interpretation of this poem and its central question (“How should he [the poet] love thee [science]? or how deem thee wise”) as being written as a general lamentation against how science has disenchanted the world, Tresch challenges us to consider that Poe’s question was wholly genuine. It would become a theme that defined the rest of his work, as Tresch writes, “Even while exploring the outer limits of imagination and irrationality, he would continue to ask how a poet might love science and deem it wise. He would arrive at a panoply of answers, always thoughtful, frequently contradictory, always sublime” (49).
While I agree with Tresch’s conclusion, his specific reading of the poem is a bit of a stretch. Rather, throughout Poe’s work, we see a man who was torn between the optimistic progress that science and industry promised through the Industrial Revolution and the Romantic lament of the loss of traditional ways of living and the mythologies that give life depth and meaning. This is expressed in the very form that Poe chose to write the poem, which is a traditional Shakespearean sonnet written in iambic pentameter. Instead of a young Poe genuinely asking how he can love science, it is much more apparent in the text that Poe is, in his youthful angst, crying out against what he perceives as an inherent antagonism between science and art.
To be fair to Tresch, Poe’s relationship to science became much more nuanced as he grew older, as evidenced by the cosmological dimensions of Eureka: A Prose Poem. Tresch makes the argument that Poe’s Eureka was a precinct and genius work that utilized ratiocination to anticipate, without hard data, the findings of 20th-century physics and astronomy. Yet, even in this “beautiful mess” of a work that clearly shows some familiarity with cosmology and astronomy, Poe’s concern is primarily one of philosophy and aesthetics. Eureka is truly a strange and difficult text to understand, and while there are some interesting parallels between Poe’s theory and Einstein’s theory of relativity and the Big Bang, it is more of a rough patchwork of speculative philosophy than of hard science.
Accordingly, Tresch argues that “Poe’s cosmology in Eureka, published the year after the AAAS [American Association for the Advancement of Science] began, was precisely the kind of publicly oriented, freewheeling, generalizing, and unlicensed speculation that the AAAS was created to exclude''(315). While Tresch casts Poe’s exclusion in a negative light by highlighting the association’s claim to power over the standards of scientific rigor and lightly criticizing this power of the institution (a line of critique I’m at least sympathetic to), one could argue that such systemization was necessary given the previous decade’s chaotic climate in regards to its claims to science. Tresch more often paints Poe with Romantic language as a sympathetic outsider, occupying the limits of science and the outer edges of our understanding. Again, while I appreciate this perspective, one also must concede that perhaps Poe was also a bit out of his depth when it came to some of the scientific ideas that surrounded him, as he more often used them as accents and flourishes to his work.
This is a common theme within much of Poe’s work: using contemporary science in the service of further understanding the nature of aesthetics and the human subject, rather than for the sake of science itself. Tresch’s claims are sometimes a bit overstated, and he tends to read Poe’s work in the best possible light to support his novel thesis, which is not always the most convincing. Despite these minor quibbles, I do think that Tresch’s argument is generally well-made, and one that deserves much more consideration and attention than has traditionally been given to Poe and his work. Given that Tresch’s prose is easily accessible and quite beautiful, these small contentions are made even smaller in the grand scheme of the book, which is still a marvelous work of scholarship.
Conclusion:
Overall, The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science is a fascinating portrait of the tragic, contentious, and short life of Edgar Allen Poe, but with an interesting and novel focus on Poe’s struggle to reconcile the emerging science of his time with his proclivity for Romanticism. Despite overstating Poe’s contribution to the field of science in a few places, Tresch calls us to recognize a side of Poe that we often forget. For those who have never read a biography of Poe, then there are few better places to dive into his life than this book.
Whether you are a fan of literature, philosophy, or the history of science, you will almost certainly find this a compelling and gripping read. Even avid Poe fans are likely to find small nuggets of new information and come to see a more well-rounded, complicated view of Poe. No matter where your interests lie, you will find much to enjoy in this well-researched and beautifully written biography of a deeply tragic, but immensely influential figure in the history of American gothic horror.