January, 1968 - UNT Digital Library
Explanation:
January, 1968 - UNT Digital Library
well-known to need quoting here. His insistence upon unity
of preconceived effect and unity of tone and mood, though
repeated often, was first and best stated in his now famous
review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (May, 1842):
A skillful literary artist has constructed a
tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his
thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but
having conceived, with deliberate care, a
certain unique or single effect to be wrought
out, he then invents such incidents--he then
combines such events as may best aid him in
establishing this preconceived effect. If
his very initial sentence tend not to the
outbringing of this effect, then he has failed
in his first step. In the whole composition
there should be no word written, of which the
tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one
pre-established design. And by such means,
with such care and skill, a picture is at
length painted which leaves in the mind of him
who contemplates it with a kindred art, a
sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea
of the tale has been presented unblemished,
because undisturbed.1
It may be wondered why Poe, who wrote most of his stories in the first person, so much admired Hawthorne, whose
tales are characteristically related by an omniscient author
in third person. The answer to this question no doubt lies
in the fact that, although Hawthorne used the third person,
his method is nearly always narrative rather than dramatic.
The reader sits at his feet and listens, almost as to an
oral storyteller. The monotony in Hawthorne's prose fiction,
lEdgar Allan Poe, The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe,
edited by James A. Harrison, Vol. XI of 17 vols. (New York,
1902), p. 108. Further citations of this edition will be
shortened to Works.
10
which Poe later reproached in 1847, relates directly to this
more or less dreamy tone2 of Hawthorne's narrative voice:
[Hawthornej . . . has little or no variety
of tone. He handles all subjects in the same
subdued, misty, dreamy, suggestive, innuendo
way, and although I think him the truest
genius, upon the whole, which our literature
possesses, I cannot help regarding him as the
most desperate mannerist of his day.
Poe's dissatisfaction here stems from his adherence to an
artistic principle of variety of tone which, as will be
demonstrated, he increased in his tales by using different
kinds of first-person narrators for different types of story
materials.4 Thus he hoped through this technique to avoid
the monotony which he felt existed in Hawthorne's fictional
prose. It apparently made more sense to Poe to have a new
voice for a new story than to have the same voice in a new
mood for each new story, and Poets reasoning upon the subject certainly shows more artistic consideration for the
principle of variety in entertainment.
