The Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe (1/2)

Since I have things to share from the classes I had this year, I decided to keep going with the "studies" material.
I just seemed to me that it could be interesting to share that kind of things, so I told myself "why not ?".

This is the first part of my course on The Fall of the House of Usher. I hope you'll learn things and that you'll want more.
I have other things, from stuff on the British Government to James Joyce and Hopper, so I'll try to keep it interesting.

All the errors (typos, grammatical, vocabulary) are mine.

From the beginning, the narrator seems afraid : the sense of « gloom » (synonym of dejection, despondency, depression, melancholy).
He's surrounded by darkness and shades and finds himself in view of the house of Usher. It makes him uneasy because it has « eyes », like a monster. He is « unnerved », paralized, under the power of the house. It is not the house that frightens him, but he is afraid of what it represents, of its image.
The power of images on the narrator-character is confirmed later, at the end of the paragraph :
« It was possible, (...) and the vacant and eye-like windows. »
==> He's more afraid by what he sees in the tarn around the house. The seese of gloom and melancholy is what is really frightening here.

First introduction of the ghost : « ghastly »
Idea of vacancy keeps up the image of the ghost : in the beginning it is nothing more than an image, a fantasy, born from the reflection of the house on the tarn.
The landscape is not terrible, it becomes terrible because of the ideas we project on it.

« I found myself » : he can't remember how he got here, he's in an unknown place, he's lost, he can't come back home, where he received the letter. He is afraid because he is lost. This is why he is so affected by images.
==> For the moment, nothing is monstruous.

« I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. »
==> the sense of gloom could have been nulled by feeling poetic sentiments (according to Poe, poetic sentiment is « what is forged in the crucible of imagination »)
The creative power of imagination is reminiscent of the creative power of the Divine. In that sense, the poetic sentiment is what goes beyond the appearance of things to touch their substance, their essence.

This is connected with imagination. He tells us what he feels : compares it with what an opium eater when the effects of the product has venished : the analogy implies hallucination. His fear, his melancholy, is not founded, is not consistent.
« A thing is consistent in the ratio of it's truth, true in the ratio of it's consistency » (Poe)
What the character feels has no consistence, therefore it can't be true. The goading of imagination can change anything into something Sublime / Divine.

So the narrator is afraid, but gives us keys to understand that the story is nothing but a story of images and point of view :
« a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression »
==> It is only his point of view, it is personnal, it can be changed. He tells us a shift in the point of view might have provided another arrangement in the elements of the scene.
Scene : dramatic sense of the word, he talks about a representation, a painting (« the details of the picture »). How could you be afraid of a picture ? He is afraid by style, aesthetics, form, manner, composition, not by facts.
The text begins with an opressed narrator, and the idea is pursued and reinforced by the fact that he feels an utter depression of the soul.
But his fancies are said to be shades, shadows, and are, by defnition, images. There is nothing but an appearance, a ghostly and ghastly one : the viewing of a ghost.

From the first paragraph, Poe gives us the keys not to be trapped in what seems to be a Gothic, frightening story.
« The melancholic house » : the melancholic character is the one that has turned it's back on the Divine, on what is supposed to be Truth, Eternal, Sublime, by believing that he could reach sublimity without the Divine.
-> John Keats, « Ode to Melancholy » :
« It dwells with beauty, beauty that must die
And joy, whose hands is ever at his lips.
(...)
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.»

3 figures of speech :
-an Antanaclasis : rhetorcal figure. Repetition of the same word with 2 diff. Meanings. HERE : Reflected. (« I reflected, that a mere different arrangement »)
Reflected : « I thought » + reflection of a mirror. Reflection is frightening.
Since this story bathes withs a specular atmosphere : « I reflected » may also imply that his reflections are nothing but the effect of the landscape on him. We understand his reflections have been infected by the effect of teh reflection on himself.
From the beginning, the landscape has a power on him. This power is shown by the sencond figure of speech.

-A Paragmenon : the repetition of words which derive from the same root.
« oppressed, depressed, impressed » : a process of submission. « Opressed » by the clouds. The idea of a weight on his shoulders. « Depressed » : a depression of the soul, ethymologically « to press down ». What is pressed down ?  The soul of the narrator is pressed down by the reflections, the landscape, the shadows.
A sorrowful « impression » : what's pressing so strong on you, it gets into you. It « pervedes » , invades the narrator. It leads us to the idea that the narrator is possessed by these feelings, all the more possessed that his fancies « unnerved » him. (deprived him of his energy)
Before having met Usher, he is already infected by his malady, his melancholy. (« It dwells with Beauty » : a human beauty, far away from the one of God)

-An Anaphora : The same word repeated at the beginning of a line / repetition of the same word.
==> The sense of the passage : its procedure
==> The status of the narrator.

Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia.   

An angel seated, looking in front of him, with empty eyes. He is surrounded by scattered objects, with a dog ? These objects are objects of Human knowledge, referring to the passing of time. They have been thrown because they are useless.
The Angel has lost the harmony and the order of God. (The bat flies, not the Angel). This knowledge has abandonned and been abandonned by God. It is not going to give the truth, the Beauty, the Hamony, the knowledge of existence / life.
The Angel is a fallen Angel.

The Melancholy is emerging from Usher himself. (« I can't alleviate the melancholy of my friend ») What is applied to the mansion originates from its master. The mansion and the master are characterized in the same way because they are the same.
The melancholy is what depresses, opresses and impresses the narrator. It's a downward movement. This is coherent with the physical moment of the narrator, who's riding down at the bottom of the valley to join the House.

The narrator is presented as the phenomenological subject of the narrative.
Upon : synonym of Under. The narrator will not be dominating, but dominated, influenced by the landscape, and therefore won't be an object, but a subject. The common life is falling.

The problem of Usher is a problem of God (Consenguinity : « a single line of descent »)







I hope you liked that first part, and that it's not too confusing. Second part to come soon !