Edgar Allan Poe and the Jungian Darkness. Shadow and Anima in Poe's tales

Edgar Allan Poe - A Poet of Jungian Darkness

Poe and Jung – A Common Ground

I would give the world to embody one half the ideas afloat in my imagination.

Edgar Allan Poe

But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.

Man cannot see God because he looks out and beyond, and not within. Modern man can't see God because he doesn't look low enough.

C.G. Jung

The testament of Poe as a man of unique genius who inspires and intrigues not just the readers, but his fellow poets is confirmed by the interest of some literary giants in him, Baudelaire, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, to name only a few. In his famous essay From Poe to Valery, Eliot recognized “Poe’s peculiar originality as a poet. (…) Poe is both the reductio ad absurdum and the artistic perfection of this [Romantic] movement”¹, says Eliot and continues to point out the intellectual merits of Poe, i.e., his originality, not just as a critic but as a poet as well by stating that “no poetry of feeling is further from sensuality or even sensuousness.”²

Poe may have been a man of his time but the link to Jung can be seen in his focus on the human psyche. As Bettina Knapp says: “[Poe’s] explorations into the rational and irrational worlds are fascinating and fearsome. Much of those writings may be seen as probing into his own inner world, the groping of a solitary, alienated man in a society that neither understood nor valued his unusual literary talents.”³ Understanding the importance of imagination and its role in our lives is something that Poe shares with Jung as well; he uses imagination to explore both the rational and the irrational realm of the human psyche, questioning and reshaping in that way our understanding of reality and of the world we live in. Poe tried to consciously not just face but dive into the unknown parts of the human psyche and mind. In Jungian terms that means that in his opus we can see his recognition and struggle with the archetypes of Anima and Shadow, his interest in synchronicities, i.e., meaningful coincidences and dreams which, according to Jung, are expressions of the unconscious both as premonitions as well as mirrors of what is going on in the minds and psyche of his narrators.

Just like Eliot pointed out, in terms of his sensibility and artistic creation, Poe is a Romantic, which is more than a suitable expression of his melancholic nature. His vivid interest in the unusual states of consciousness is reflected both in his life and writings, whereby it remains an open question whether these interests were fueled by his specific circumstances in life or if those states of consciousness were his attempt to explain the events that occurred in his life. They are closely related to the perception abilities of human beings, and the problematic of perception is at the base of every story written by Poe. In alignment with the Jungian theory, Poe is very much aware that the irrational, i.e., the unconscious world, is as equally important and real as the one we define as a rational and objective reality. According to the Jungian tradition, as well as the tradition of Romanticism, Poe was aware that the ratio and intellect are neither the only nor the greatest forms of obtaining knowledge, and, just like Jung’s, Poe’s mind was restless, always seeking, questioning, learning and inquiring:

“Intuitive by nature, Poe discovered and explored realms that lie beyond the visible sphere, beyond the dimensions of time and space. In these supernal spheres he experienced an exaltation of the senses that enabled him to penetrate the very heart of mystery. (…) He perceived both sonorous and inaudible voices, long moments of silences followed by the emergence of outer-worldly harmonies.”⁴

In the Jungian spirit, Poe expressed his feelings by symbols, analogies and metaphors; his mood reflects and is reflected by his emotions, the harmony and music of his words, and his imagery reflects his aesthetic sensibility. His aesthetic view of the world can maybe be best synthesized by the words: grotesque and arabesque, which he uses to depict his perception of reality. In that context, the grotesque stands for the fragmentary nature of ordinary perception of reality which, in a way, is an illusion because that perception is limited by time and space and thereby impedes us to reach higher states of consciousness. Contrary to that type of perception, the arabesque reality represents a perception of the otherworldly reality which we reach by imagination and intuition, and not just by intellect. As Eliot pointed out: “When we read the poetry of Rimbaud or Blake, we enter a different world; with Mallarmé and Poe we have a heightened sense of a familiar world.”⁵

Poe’s tales have a somewhat realistic frame; their world can be a little odd, but it is a world that we recognize, whose rules and principles we are familiar with. Poe is a master of shifting those principles and in that way, he creates a completely new world with a logic of its own - he attempts to rationally explain supernatural, unusual events. His fantasy contains rationality, and logic and analysis are used in an artistic manner. As Knapp said: “Poe both practiced and advocated a poetics devoid of political and moral connotations, based rather on aesthetic considerations, on cool, distanced observations of the subject”⁶. Those observations depict a subject who dwells in the supernatural, i.e., in the Unknown of the Jungian unconscious, and whose imbalanced psyche enables them not just to dwell in that world but to feel like they really belong there: their physical and mental disabilities, obsessions, curses, and fantasies make that cosmos of the Unknown their true habitat and the source of both horror and inspiration. Thus, in line with the Jungian thought, Poe is very much aware not just of the existence of the unconscious world but also of its overwhelming power over the individual, i.e., the Ego-cogito.

Poe’s work seems to embody the famous Jung’s line that whatever we do not make conscious will continue to affect our lives and we shall call it fate. This feeling of fatality as objective reality in an irrational world is forever present in Poe’s poems and tales as a sensing the presence of something that we cannot rationally grasp but whose power we unmistakably feel and are unable to resist or fight against. Thus, a point of difference in Poe and Jung is the end result of the maxima “Know thyself”, which is threaded in the work of both of them. That difference consists in the fact that Jung propagated getting to know ourselves so that we can grow by grasping, dealing with and overcoming the unconscious contents that haunt us and, in that way, prevent ending up victims of those contents. On the other hand, Poe’s characters are aware of the unconscious haunting them, but they have given up the fight, i.e., they do not believe that those contents can be understood or integrated but have rather surrendered to their influence and in that way doomed their ego consciousness to perish in the all-encompassing Unconscious.

Poe’s own personality shows us how strong the influence of the archetypal contents on the human psyche can be. We can find numerable references to Poe as that of a “damned” poet, but perhaps it would be more precise to call him as a “haunted” one. Poe was not more “damned” than the rest of us when it comes to facing archetypal contents, but he was more sensitive when it comes to recognizing their forms of expression, their terrifying power, and their everlasting presence in our psychic reality. As a poet, he had the ability to see further, experience more in terms of both intensity and variety of archetypes; he possessed the intellectual curiosity which went beyond our five senses. That world beyond the five senses is Poe’s world as well as the world of his characters, the “haunted” world. It is their reality because they live in it, never mind that such a world does not correspond to what we perceive as an objective, rational reality. Poe’s creative genius added dreams, premonitions, visions, elevated states of consciousness, unthinkable perceptions of the mundane to that overwhelming world of archetypal contents, and what he created was a world where ratio can neither be the guide not the judge of people or events, and where, in its place, imagination and instinct reign. He certainly cannot be accused of not looking low enough for the otherworldly, i.e., the Divine - Poe is too well aware of that dark world and its contents but be voluntarily engages with its contents in the form of monsters, ghosts and natural phenomena, even at the cost of being devoured by them: “He lives in a world of dreams, shadows, and regrets for a lost, unpossessed and unattainable love”⁷, says Eliot.

The unattainable love is described in the unhealthy relationship of Poe’s heroes with the Anima archetype. The Anima, i.e., the inner woman, the feminine principle in the male psyche, the Eros, is a reflection of the kind of relationship a man is capable of establishing with a woman. In its positive aspect, the Anima serves as a productive force, a strong creative source of inspiration, but in its negative form, i.e., when a man’s ego is not strong enough and his identification with the Anima is too strong⁸, the Ego falls prey to the Anima archetype, usually depicted in the form of a femme fatale, some otherworldly apparition or a cataclysmic natural force that cannot be resisted.

Poe’s heroes are always helpless against their female counterparts, i.e., the women in their lives always overpower them. His anima figures, says Knapp, “are far from being either glamorous or sexually seductive. (…) Poe’s feminine characters are for the most part (…) gentle, young, otherworldly spectral shadows, reincarnated beings, or vampires ready to destroy and dismember a man (…). They dominate because of the male’s sheer weakness and helplessness, his strangely passive condition. In the most instances, the narrator displays a longing and need for the feminine principle as well as a fear and hatred of it, indicative of an extreme dependency on the anima.”⁹

Poe’s “sirens”, as Martin Bickman names them, are the governing force and the embodiments of fate of his heroes. Along the lines of the Jungian idea of the human psyche as a self-regulating system which encompasses both the masculine and feminine, and strives toward achieving balance, “a figure of the opposite sex, surrounded by an aura of the mysterious and numinous, holds out the promise of harmonious unity, of initiation into the higher secrets, a promise usually accompanied, though, by the possibilities of dissolution and death.”¹⁰

Poe’s female characters are, thus, hardly human beings in their own right¹¹ but are rather visions and images that arise from the deep and dark corners of the narrators’ psyche, mirrors of their distorted psyche, “nocturnal emanations, terrors in the night, revenants (returning spirits), fleeting memories arising from some nearby tomb or sepulcher, thoughts or feelings personified in spectral form.”¹² They have greater and broader knowledge and intelligence than their partners who are depicted as introverts, alienated from themselves and the world. Their alienation, however, is not due to them not descending into the underworld but is due to the fact that they learn nothing from it - their Ego does not venture down and come back up intact and broadened by further knowledge. Instead, as Zarei says, the confrontation with the dark side of the self is not necessarily a destructive, downward move. Self-destruction in Poe is part of a wider scenario of self-analysis which leads to the most profound human fear - the fear of self-revelation.¹³

Depicting the descent, the dark night of the soul, a night sea journey is what Poe excels at. As Knapp says, it “narrates a primordial experience, not necessarily a personal one but always one that is transpersonal [which expresses] a living, true and burning reality existent in a people’s psyche and culture.”¹⁴ Poe’s stories of descending into the darkness of the abyss of the Unknown go in line with what Jung described as a Hero’s journey:

“The purpose of the descent as universally exemplified in the myth of the hero is to show that only in the region of danger (watery abyss, cavern, forest, island, castle, etc.) can one find the “treasure hard to attain” (jewel, virgin, life-potion, victory over death).”¹⁵

Knapp sees the same pattern in Poe’s heroes when she says that Poe’s “narrators are passive, one-sided, and ailing, necessitating a return to the primal state, to death for renewal. A dissolution of the ego rather than strengthening of its center of consciousness occurs, a physical and spiritual loss of identity.”¹⁶ That kind of death is an initiation, a passage into nothingness as a path transformation and rebirth. In Poe’s own words:

“I began to reflect how magnificent a thing it was to die in such a manner, and how foolish it was in me to think of so paltry a consideration as my own individual life, in view of so wonderful a manifestation of God’s power. (…) I became possessed with the keenest curiosity about the whirl itself. I positively felt a wish to explore its depths, even at the sacrifice I was going to make.”¹⁷

The sacrifice the narrator is about to make is that of his Ego consciousness, i.e., of his personality as he knows it: in order to experience transformation and develop further, he must die and be reborn like a phoenix.¹⁸ By the emergence into the whirlpool, as a symbol of the Unconscious, the narrator - hero “recreates himself not by suppression or projection but through coming to terms with his unconscious”¹⁹. As a dissolving agent, water always symbolizes transformation and rebirth, a constant flow and change, “a transitional force, a mediator between life and death. Water is also associated with the collective unconscious because both are unfathomably deep and unplumbed realms; innumerable riches exist within their depths.”²⁰ The riches of the archetypal contents are steppingstones on his individuation path, on the path of him reinventing himself:

“If an initiation is to be complete, if fresh ideations and attitudes are to prevail, the death experience must at least be acknowledged and the maelstrom traversed; the enormous velocities and heaving waters of the unconscious explored, the vortices, circular configurations, and ensuing sense of disorientation undergone. Such is the all-powerful and redoubtable force that precedes revelation and a theophany.”²¹

No matter of the end result in terms of obtaining higher spheres of consciousness, greater knowledge or understanding of the unconscious contents, and the way they change the narrator, it is more than obvious that the hero from the beginning of the story is not the same character that we encounter at its end. The transformation may not be logically explained or be intellectually clearly defined but that is understandable since such a thing is hardly possible when talking about experiences that have little to do with rationality. Just like with dreams, explaining mystical experiences such as the ones described in Poe’s tales in intellectual terms is inadequate because the rational and the irrational operate on different scales, and thus cannot be equally adequately explained by words. As Poe said:

“I was borne violently into the channel of the Ström, and in a few minutes was hurried down the coast into the ‘grounds’ of the fishermen. A boat picked me up—exhausted from fatigue—and (now that the danger was removed) speechless from the memory of its horror.”²²

In dealing with the horror of not just the unconscious but of one’s own personality as well, Poe’s characters dissect their emotions, motivation, and actions. However, the gained knowledge does nothing to transform their personalities. As Knapp says, the dichotomy between what they are and what they would like to be is so great that they do not feel worthy of an admirable character, be it as it may in the form of an anima figure or in terms of grow in understanding of their own character. They are caught up in the web of overwhelming power of their shadows, shocked by its propensity for evil that their one-sided pattern of behavior cannot free them from the grip of the archetype²³:

“The acceptance of one’s good and evil characteristics through and act of cognition should expand consciousness, giving light to what has darkness. Poe’ protagonists, however, remain entrapped in their circumscribed infernal regions.”²⁴

An overview of Jung’s concept of The Shadow in relation to Poe’s Psychology of Fear

The archetype of the Shadow is one of Jung’s basic concepts. The Shadow, as the unconscious part of the personality that contains characteristics which Ego does not want to recognize as one’s own, can be approached differently. The apparently easiest approach would be to deny the existence of the Shadow and thus to suppress it, or to project it on an external object. This approach, however, gives no hope for the psychological maturity of the individual. On the other hand, there is an option to recognize and accept the existence of the Shadow, which is a pre-requisite for self-knowledge, although this cannot be done without a considerable moral effort and resistance from the Ego-cogito part of the personality.

Poe’s stories represent a rich Shadow material from the Jungian point of view. In that respect, Poe is a strikingly modern writer, fascinated by both human nature and psyche. His tales of horror, terror and supernatural can be regarded as descents into the internal inferno, a bleak, gloomy and otherworldly place. Psychologically interpreted, those descends are the exploration of the depths of the collective unconscious, the very core of existence and mystery. The darkness experienced in those depths can be linked with the primal void, with prima materia from which the new and the unknown originated; it is where the seed of what is yet to be created grows and develops, emerging in the end into awareness and consciousness, from darkness into the light.

The individuation process is a path full of thorns. According to Jung, getting to know oneself is one of the most difficult tasks and rightfully feared experiences. Descending into the depths of the unconscious should only be undertaken by individuals who possess the strength, the will and the introspection as only some of the prerequisites that are necessary to enable a successful confrontation with the forces of the unconscious. All of this Poe’s stories seem to prove and vividly depict.

Poe was a writer fascinated by the potential and the power of the mind and of what it may create; it is the interior mystery of the mind and its obsessions that he analyzes. He investigates the world of nightmare, of grotesque and fantastic events related to the psychologically deformed beings. This morbid aspect of psychology, on the one hand, and the rationality, logic and will, on the other, are what clashes in the majority of his tales. Although his characters vary, the unifying axis is their inwardly orientation, their obsession with death and their (irrational) fears. However, even when probing the supernatural world, Poe always emphasizes logic and reason. It is precisely his ability to present an objective assessment of an external situation in combination with the inner world of his characters that makes his tales fascinating. The detailed, objective description of the outside world follows the described distorted inner events, adding, in that way, to the horror of the described situations also the fear of the plausibility that they can, actually, be real.

[...]

¹ Qtd. from “T. S. Eliot on Poe,” Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Poe Studies - Poe Newsletter - T. S. Eliot on Poe (eapoe.org)

² Ibid

³ Knapp, Bettina. Edgar Allan Poe. Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. New York, 1984, p.2

⁴ Knapp, p. 45

⁵ Qtd. from “T. S. Eliot on Poe,” Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Poe Studies - Poe Newsletter - T. S. Eliot on Poe (eapoe.org)

⁶ Knapp, p. 45

⁷ Qtd. from “T. S. Eliot on Poe,” Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Poe Studies - Poe Newsletter - T. S. Eliot on Poe (eapoe.org)

⁸ In understanding the Anima archetype properly Bickman provided significant insight when he stated that the aspect of the feminine that should be called anima possesses a transformative character upon the human psyche, i.e., it is vectored toward individuation. Future development of the personality, widening of the ego and the integration of with the rest of the self, as opposed to fixation or regression. Bickman, Martin. The Unsounded Centre. Jungian Studies in American Romanticism. The University of North Carolina Press. Chapel Hill. 1980, p. 60

⁹ Knapp, p. 120-121

¹⁰ Bickman, p. 59

¹¹ “Most of Poe’s female figures should strictly not even be called projections, because the word implies that there is enough of the external person to serve as a reflecting screen.” Bickman, p. 60

¹² Knapp, p. 121

¹³ Zarei, Rouhollah. Edgar Allan Poe, An Archetypal Readin g. Cambria Press, New York. 2013. Chapter 1.

¹⁴ Knapp, p. 108

¹⁵ Zarei qtd. Jung, p.3

¹⁶ Knapp, p. 109

¹⁷ Edgar Allan Poe. A Descent into the Maelström.

¹⁸ “Everything that lives must pass through many deaths”, says Jung in CW9i: 178

¹⁹ Zarei, p. 6

²⁰ Knapp, p. 111

²¹ Knapp, p. 119

²² Edgar Allan Poe. A Descent into the Maelström.

²³ Knapp, p. 154-155

²⁴ Knapp, p. 155-156