Fanciful flight

I don't know from where but the other day, out of the blue, I was really vividly reminded of the House of Usher - remember Poe?

Now, I am not a lover of the macabre or the horrible in stories and all who know me can testify to that. I watched Evil Dead in the crook of pa's elbow with a carefully positioned cushion before me and am still fanciful of peskies and ghosts. A mild horror film will give me atleast a week of sleepless nights! To be succinct, I'd rather not watch any ...

Yet I have and have always had a morbid fascination with Edgar Allan Poe. His tales of mystery and horror leave me spellbound and the eerie atmosphere pervades long after the tale is over. Poe was probably dissed in America and it took the Europeans to bring it to their notice. Yet because of the generally depraved persona ascribed to Poe, he was treated with some distaste. Yeats went as far as to call him 'vulgar' apparently.

Anyway the point is that I am trying to understand what about the stories of Poe is so fascinating. The Fall of the House of Usher is actually quite magnificient in its construction and execution. The story takes you in. The house is palpable and you can feel it come alive. The tension is so real when Madeline actually appears. The story is a story of a house - the house is the character. There are so many undercurrents to it - none explicit, yet you feel them. Incest, mental illness, death, resurrection - all find a place. The house itself, the protagonist, is displayed in very anthropomorphic terms. Its windows are likened to eyes, and in the end it dies along with the siblings. Another striking thing is that you don't know much about the narrator and even Roderik and Madeline Usher except for their quirks, paranoia and strange reflexes and yet you don't really notice because it grips you with elements that are so trivial if you think about them and yet the mainstay of the story - like the state of the garden.

Apparently also, Poe thought that it was important to depict stuff as undercurrents rather than explicitly state everything. I think he revelled in confusing all the senses - and bringing about a sense of complete overload - a kind of "totality". He absolutely loved bringing in intensely melodramatic psychological manifests of conscious and subconscious actions including dreams. He spins stories that transcend the boundary between a person's surrounding and head - like it's one environment and fair game. Besides Usher, I really find the "Telltale Heart" and "The Moth" fascinating. Poe is the master of the art of short stories. Slowly the story develops and it's magnitude dawns upon you much later on; Poe's isn't an obvious art in my opinion and I think that's what I love about his stories.

It seems that Debussy tried to write an opera on The Fall of the House of Usher. Unsurprising really ... it is a fantastic story to set to music. Still, it's an opera about a house - a morbid, decaying one at that! Debussy never completed it though. For Poe - dreams were more real than reality, he was a pre-cursor to the Symbolist movement and celebrated in France. All Debussy wanted was to focus on operas for Poe's : The Devil in the Belfry and The Fall of the House of Usher. Neither was completed. However, Poe’s literature, including The Raven, was inspiration for Rapsodie, that Debussy did complete. The play off between the orchestra and the saxophone make for the perfect intersection of Poe's prose and Debussy's music: apparently a reflection of the composer's own life at the time.

Anyhow, I digress. As lightning strikes the House of Usher and the narrator looks back to see the lightning, the crack through the centre and the destruction of the house, everyone leaves to draw their own conclusion. Therein I think lies the beauty of Poe's writing: he never imposes what he thinks is the story, the story is individual to each of us as we draw our own conclusions in the overactive, imaginative, fanciful corners of unreality.