What We Talk About When We Talk About Poe

Poe's tales have been known to elicit responses in readers that range from the critical and incisive to the creative and imaginative. What follows is a purposeful (and playful) illustration of a response to Poe that collapses these very categories of reception. On the one hand, Poe's prose writing persuades readers to practice the kind of logical responsiveness that the author himself embodied in his capacity as a critic, and that the more clear-eyed incarnations among his characters and narrators intermittently model in the sober opposition they offer to the improbable and uncanny. On the other hand, Poe's short fiction can occupy an interpretive position akin to compulsion, crafted as it frequently is to induce readers to relax the defenses with which they would normally meet the author's signature exaggerations. Considering the insinuating appeal of the latter response, we might with some justification consider a telling selection of Poe's stories to qualify as a form of captivity narrative. For in their encounters with these works readers often find that their critical instincts are slowly eroded; they are in consequence left "captive" to a pleasing species of release that depends on their submitting to a determining will other than their own.