its own nightmare visions in an empty and narcissistic exercise. The lurking danger — in this sketch, in Hawthorne's tales and romances, and in his meditations on art and life — is that the imaginative and the actual worlds might somehow be cut off from each other, leaving each in an impoverished and untenable position. When, in the final year of his life, he lamented that 'The Present, the Immediate, the Actual, has proved too potent for me,' Hawthorne signaled in the coded language he had long employed his awareness of the death of his imagination.
Poe's attitude toward the imagination and thus toward his fiction contrasts sharply with that of Hawthorne. Whereas Hawthorne labors toward the latitude he sees necessary for the romance, Poe leaps boldly into what the narrator of 'Berenice' (1835) calls 'palace[s] of -77- imagination' and thumbs his nose at the hot, hard practical life of America. Whereas Hawthorne focuses on the consequences of human action with painstaking emphasis, Poe (as we shall see) ignores consequences, at times with sportive insistence. He champions the imagination, proclaims its range as unlimited, and sets it free to play in a realm of its own where it is lord of all it surveys. In his 'Marginalia' (1846) Poe describes certain fancies that come to one on the 'borderground' between sleep and wakefulness. His version of a middle ground, unlike Hawthorne's, is not a place where the actual and the imaginary may meet in productive combination; the fancies of which he speaks inspire ecstasy beyond the range of human experience; they reveal 'a glimpse of the spirit's outer world.' Poe's 'border-ground,' in other words, is a point from which the imagination, unbounded and free from constraint, may journey into the 'supernal.'
Poe's fiction enacts the system of priorities suggested by this passage from the 'Marginalia.' His tales present the spectacle of the imagination playing games of its own according to rules of its own making. And where the imagination is at its purest and most triumphant, we may expect to find it transcending consequences. The narrator of 'Loss of Breath' (1832), for example, undergoes startling mutilations that have no 'real' effect on him. After cutting off his ears, a surgeon cuts him open and removes part of his viscera. Later, one ear is somehow back on his head. And, although the cats that eat on his nose do cause pain, no more is heard of wounds or their effects. He tells his story in the manner of someone having a bad day.
The most thoroughgoing example of a situation without consequences comes in 'A Predicament' (1845), the companion-piece to 'How to Write a Blackwood Article.' Both 'How to Write' and 'A Predicament' abound with parody: Poe satirizes the formulas of contemporary magazine fiction, mocks his own style, and presents in burlesque his most fundamental ideas about the imagination. In a context of verbal frolic, the Signora Psyche Zenobia receives her instructions about how to write a story from the editor of Blackwood's Magazine. One point predominates: the writer, says Mr. Blackwood, must get into a situation no one was ever in before and then record his (or in this case, her) sensations. Sensations, he says, are the great thing: 'Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make a -78- note of your sensations. If you wish to write forcibly, Miss Zenobia, pay minute attention to your sensations.'
Readers of 'A Predicament' will recall the bizarre manner in which Zenobia chances to follow Mr. Blackwood's advice. As she gazes out the clock-face of a church tower, the minute hand comes around and, to her horror, pins her head in the opening. Then, as the minute hand slowly cuts into her neck, she proceeds to give 'minute attention' to her sensations. 'It had already buried its sharp edge a full inch in my flesh, and my sensations grew indistinct and confused.' 'The bar had buried itself two inches in my neck. I was aroused to a sense of exquisite pain.' 'The bar was now four inches and a half deep in my neck, and there was only a little bit of skin to cut through. My sensations were those of entire happiness.' One eye pops out and stares insolently up at her from a gutter. Finally her head comes off and tumbles down into the street. Zenobia concludes the story of her predicament by recalling her singular feelings on the occasion.
'A Predicament' takes us past the ideas of destruction and death. From the moment it becomes clear that Zenobia will continue narrating after her head comes off, we are set apart, fully and finally, from reality as we know it. Though exaggeration and banter have sustained the uneasy tension of the tale up to this point, the decapitation of the narrator is the masterstroke. Poe has liberated his imagination from our assumptions and given us Zenobia, his only woman narrator and in a way the most Poesque of all, not the unreliable narrator we have come to know and mistrust but the indestructible narrator, whose disencumbered voice transcends all, whose narrative has no relation to the conditions of human existence. She is Ligeia in burlesque, a caricature of a caricature; her name Psyche means 'the soul,' she tells us. Then she adds: 'that's me, I'm all soul.'
In 'The Power of Words' (1845), one of Poe's fables featuring a dialogue between angels after the destruction of the earth, Agathos recalls speaking a star into existence 'with a few passionate sentences,' something possible because of 'the physical power of words' to create. Again, in the 'Marginalia' entry cited above, Poe writes of his complete 'faith in the power of words.' Such a faith underlies Poe's commitment to the imagination and his empower-79- ment of narrators who speak 'supernal' worlds into being. Equally bold but radically different is the position of Melville's philosopher Babbalanja in Mardi, who holds that 'Truth is in things, and not in words,' that 'truth is voiceless,' that fictions are as real as shovels and trenches — and equally liable to deceive. Melville would never agree with Poe about the power of words (though he used them effulgently); his primary metaphor for romance is a chartless voyage such as he undertook imaginatively in Mardi, sustained by the conviction that 'those who boldly launch, cast off all cables; and turning from the common breeze, that's fair for all, with their own breath, fill their own sails.' If the mention of casting off cables recalls James's balloon-of-experience analogy, the idea of a self-directed quest over 'untracked' seas promises (even more severely) discoveries at once disencumbered and disconcerting — the story in brief of Melville's career as a writer of romance.
As Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) demonstrate, Melville levied on personal experience for the substance of his early narratives. Both of these narratives deal with his adventure in the South Pacific, where he lived and loitered after deserting an Australian whaling vessel in the early 1840s. By the time he began Mardi in 1848, however, Melville was beginning to feel the constraints of writing picaresque travel narratives; because some critics had doubted the factual basis of Typee and Omoo, he proposed to write 'a romance of Polynesian adventure.' He would, as he announced, 'out with the Romance.' Despite these intentions, Mardi opens as a straightforward narrative, picking up literally where Omoo left off; but it quickly moves to uncharted dimensions. At work on his 'narrative of facts,' as Melville announced to his publisher John Murray, he 'began to feel an incurable distaste for the same; & a longing to plume my pinions for a flight, & felt irked, cramped & fettered by plodding with dull common places.' So, 'suddenly,' he began 'to work heart & soul at a romance,' something new and original. 'It opens like a true narrative — like Omoo for example, on ship board — & the romance & poetry of the thing thence grow continually, till it becomes a story wild enough I assure you & with a meaning too.' Replete with elements of allegory, satire, and philosophical speculation, Mardi reflects Melville's readings in Dante, Rabelais, Edmund Spenser, and -80- Thomas Browne, as well as his developing concern for what he called the great art of telling the truth.'
Melville thus came to the romance by way of personal odyssey. Energized by a desire to 'plume his pinions' for flight, he felt exhilaration as he cast aside the fetters of convention and moved toward the expansive world of 'romance & poetry.' The tone of his letter to Murray is typically his own. But his sense of imaginative release is something that all practitioners of the romance envision. To Hawthorne it appeared as a 'Faery Land' shielded from actuality; to Poe it was a glimpse of the 'supernal'; to Melville it arrived as a 'story wild' and unpredicted.
In the work of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville revenge thrives on an atmosphere of intensity that brings the self to stand apart from communal and institutional concerns, to confront what is perceived as a target with the full force of mind and volition. Various strategies of caricature serve each writer well; for by means of caricature the portrayal of self is perforce distorted, at once limited and magnified, invested with incipient violence.
Virtually all of Poe's tales display the human form in distorted and extravagant postures, versions of what Poe called the grotesque. In 'King Pest' (1835), for example, the method is that of portrait caricature, which E. H. Gombrich (almost as if he had been reading Poe) defines as 'the playful distortion of a victim's face.' Poe characterizes each of his strange company by describing one highly exaggerated facial feature
