Critical Reassessments: David Ketterer’s The Rationale of Deception in Poe

A notable part of the decades-long wave of serious literary criticism dedicated to Edgar Allan Poe beginning in the 1950s, David Ketterer's The Rationale of Deception in Poe (1979) presents a unified theory of Poe's unified theory. For Ketterer, Poe's oeuvre revolves around deception. More specifically, Poe uses deception to confront deception: "Operating on the belief that in relation to a sensed visionary reality everyday reality constitutes one gross deception, Poe finds himself in a better position to attack the false reality than to reveal the true. He hopes to destroy a deceptive reality by means of various technical and thematic deceptions of his own."1 Perhaps contrary to expectations set forth by Ketterer's title, deception here describes not Poe's intention to deceive but his efforts to unveil a truth that may finally prove unattainable.2 Ketterer then tracks Poe's aesthetic aim across his works. To rationalize how a work like "Sonnet—To Science" (1829) can be understood under the same umbrella as the Dupin detection tales and Eureka (1848), Ketterer identifies an evolution in Poe's thought "from a position where reason (viewed as productive of deception) is opposed to imagination, to a position where a species of reason allied with imagination is valued in an ambiguous concept of intuition" (xiii). Forty-five years later, Ketterer's central argument remains compelling, and, importantly, the book is generative. It remains a touchstone in readings of Poe's works.The full scope of Ketterer's nuanced, multilayered argument requires a hefty first chapter to flesh out. As if to stimulate interest in underappreciated works and justify his (perhaps overstated) focus on "Poe's entire output," Ketterer opens with an analysis of the 1839 "Devil in the Belfry" (xiv). The tale "provides a clear illustration of the ways in which" space, time, and self "control human awareness" (1). Life in the "Dutch borough of Vondervotteimittiss" models a blinkered reality—or, in Ketterer's words, "an exclusively rational and regulated life that dulls the imagination and turns people into cabbages" (1, 2). The story's narrator, so sure of his objectivity, "displays the same narrow rigidity of mind that makes the village what it is" (3). Then a "foreign-looking young man," who came from outside the valley, takes control of the belfry and makes the clock ring thirteen times, instead of twelve, thus introducing a "spatio-temporal reality beyond the norm—beyond the valley, off the face of the clock" (3). Ketterer sees Poe as a devil in the belfry, "campaigning against insular systems of reason that make the contours of life fixed and distinct" (4). The story illustrates how seeing a part for the whole is the foundation of deception. The possibility of pushing beyond this vision to actuality, however, is hardly assured. Ketterer cites Poe's 1836 review of Slidell to show how a "cursory glance" or "sidelong survey" offers a better perspective than "minute inspection" or "any direct gaze" (27). In effect, looking through "the half-closed eye" allows one to push past a deceptive reality to see the fusion of all: "The effect of looking at the world through half-closed eyes is, of course, to blur the outlines and allow everything to fuse into everything else—in fact, to destroy the external universe as usually perceived and eradicate the barriers erected by time, space, and self" (28).Having established the importance of deception and fusion in Poe's works, Ketterer reconceptualizes the "arabesque" and "grotesque." He sees the terms as reflecting not just genres or types of tales but approaches to reality or states. Arabesques find the ideal—or the arabesque reality—emerging from the "mundane reality" (37). Meanwhile, grotesques view the "mundane as perceived from the projected ideal reality" (37). Basically, arabesques point to the ideal—a necessarily "contingent, vague, and incomplete" unified reality—and grotesques critique the deceptive reality that stands radically apart from the ideal. All of Poe's creative work, Ketterer argues, can be understood "in terms of these two basic tendencies" (38).The book is then thematically organized into three parts, further divided into three chapters each. Essentially, part 1, "Deception," targets the grotesques and maritime fiction; part 2, "Fusion," treats the arabesques (poetry, the classically understood arabesques, and the landscape, metaphysical, and mesmeric works); and part 3, "Intuition," covers his criticism and critical theory, uncovers the arabesque in the ratiocinative tales, and closes with Eureka. The broad themes trace his developmental argument, but the discussions of various works do not proceed strictly chronologically. The Rationale of Deception, more than anything else, is an organized collection of close readings with a near monomaniacal interpretive focus on deception and perceived realities.Part 1 begins with "The Rudimental Life," a biographical chapter that attempts to explain how Poe's life inspired his "philosophical rationale of deception" (49). Ketterer synthesizes material from previous works—some trustworthy, such as A. H. Quinn's Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (1941) and Sidney Moss's Poe's Literary Battles (1963), and some not so trustworthy, such as Joseph Wood Krutch's Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius (1926) and Marie Bonaparte's The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation (trans. 1949). This chapter feels the least useful today. It also stands as the section most engaged with outside contexts, thus necessarily exposing the book's weakness in situating Poe in his times. Of course, works before and especially after helpfully have illuminated key literary, cultural, and historical contexts for Poe studies.3Through its redefinition of the grotesque, part 1 provides a framework that calls for serious critical attention to Poe's minor (and critically disparaged) works. For "A Tale of Jerusalem," Ketterer sees "the beleaguered city of Jerusalem" as "an emblem of man's imprisoned perceptions," a claim that is intriguing if not entirely persuasive for the comic tale (97–98). Ketterer also explains how the more celebrated doppelgänger stories are related to the imp of the perverse: "The human condition is that of division both externally and psychically. . . . In a certain sense, it is man's imp of the perverse that leads him to distinguish between things and a sense of ideality that inspires him to pull things together" (102). In the "Tell-Tale Heart," "the narrator is trying to escape from grotesque reality into arabesque reality. . . . He believes that by annihilating the earthly part of himself he may attain ideality" (104). For Ketterer, Poe's attraction to the sea can be understood in similar terms: "Its unstructured state makes it a perfect symbol of that marginal awareness which occurs when a quicksand grotesque reality gives way to arabesque reality" (118). While one could quibble with his claim that the narrator of "MS. Found in a Bottle" is "technically dead" once aboard the second ship, it seems more important to recognize Ketterer's insistence that Pym is a "highly unified work—structured, in fact, to a quite extraordinary degree" and commend his in-depth reading (122, 125).After the groundbreaking first chapter, part 2, "Fusion," is the most satisfying section. Toward the start of chapter 5, "A Sort of Runic Rhyme," Ketterer provocatively states that "it is extremely likely that Poe thought of his poetry as an organic whole, much like Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass" (152). The rest of the chapter then convincingly assesses works from Tamerlane to "The Bells," offering particularly strong readings of "The Raven" and "Ulalume" along the way. Rereading his analysis of "The Raven" emphasizes how central one's understanding of the relationship between the raven and Pallas is to a broader interpretation of the poem. Memorably, in Romancing the Shadow, Betsy Erkkila read the raven in opposition to Pallas, an ominous threat to Western literature and culture that also "evokes the fear of racial mixture and the sexual violation of the white woman by the black man that was at the center of antebellum debates about the future of the darker races in white America."4 Meanwhile, Ketterer reads the raven as an extension of Pallas, a figure reminiscent of the Vulture that preys "upon the poet's heart" in "Sonnet—to Science" (169). For him, "the raven represents the quest of the intellectual for knowledge," and the student's "desire for a mathematical certainty" eliminates the possibility of an emergent arabesque reality and the return of Lenore, thus ensuring the speaker's "Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance" (169).Ketterer's central argument is well supported by his readings of the classic arabesques, especially "Ligeia" and "The Fall of the House of Usher," the finest of Poe's stories to him and many readers. By the end of "Ligeia," the narrator, unlike the one in "The Raven," successfully attains an arabesque vision and destroys an "earthly vision," perhaps dying along the way (192). Ligeia's return through Rowena exemplifies the fusion characteristic of the arabesque state. While Ketterer admits that "no single-minded interpretation" of "Usher" can be adequate, he states, "The tale is about Usher's lapse into the arabesque state" and, further, "the collapse into oneness of the universe from its present state of dispersed heterogeneity and deception" (192, 195). Ketterer's commentaries on the rest of the arabesques and the landscape, mesmeric, and metaphysical works help shore up his critical argument.In part 3, Ketterer confronts the paradox that Poe increasingly seemed to turn to the very reason that he viewed as deceptive at the start of his career. Ketterer sees this duality as a byproduct of his American environment, but grounds his claim in biographical hearsay: "Poe appears to be a fitting representative of a schizophrenic American condition, although on balance Poe belongs primarily with the Transcendentalists" (222). He also finds that Poe's "analytic activities" unwittingly confirm his own suspicions about "man's reason," which is necessarily "subject to idiopathic limitation" (222). Ketterer sometimes gets caught in the weeds when discussing limited selections of Poe's criticism, such as when he points out inconsistencies between Poe's understanding of the "fancy" versus "imagination" (228–29). While this section doesn't contain any flashing brilliance, it does offer some wisdom: "Although Poe overvalued the power of his analytic intellect, some critics are in danger of seriously undervaluing it" (231).Ketterer takes on the tales of ratiocination works with limited success. He sees Dupin as a "viable Usher" that "exhibits the potent combination of intellect and imagination." Still, some views may appear strained to some readers. For "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," he argues the death of the mother and daughter "is to be attributed to their having achieved the arabesque state" (244). He also suggests, "It is likely that Poe chose the name Dupin for its suggestion of duplicity" (253–54). And again walking on suspect ground through reliance on Poe biographies, he questions if the "intellectual synthesis" achieved in these tales was purchased by Poe's "schizophrenic breakdown" (254). Not only is it unclear what information supports this claim, but the argument itself feels illogical.Readers expecting to apply Ketterer's framework to Eureka may be disappointed by chapter 10: "The Full Design." Strangely, attention to the arabesque falls out of this discussion. Ketterer pushes back on critics' insistence of the work as "a contribution to modern science" and rejects it as a cosmological key to "interpreting the tales and poems" (255). Instead, he sees the work as "revelatory of Poe's state of mind," somehow displaying "Poe's overweening paranoia and megalomania" (255, 256). Over the course of the chapter, Ketterer walks his way through Eureka, summarizing various sections rather than offering clarifying analysis. The result is an anticlimactic conclusion.Upon its initial release, Rationale of Deception received mostly positive reviews. Eric Carlson offers qualified praise. He identifies Ketterer as "the first to have studied out in great, though not exhaustive, detail the richly suggestive and significant 'arabesque dimension' of Poe's 'full design.'"5 But he faults Ketterer for not bothering to incorporate important Poe criticism since 1949, "as an academic treatise would." If anything, the fact that the work consists, as Carlson notes, "largely of a personal reading" feels even more striking rereading it today.6 While Carlson highlights the broad success of Ketterer's project, Patrick Quinn judges his "search of a unifying principle" for all of Poe's work as ultimately unsuccessful.7 Quinn reasons, "If he had claimed less for this account, offering it as a description of a tendency only, one that recurs now and again but not insistently in Poe's work, his book would be a good deal shorter but more persuasive."8 His review largely consists of a series of readings contradicting Ketterer's readings, and, as with Carlson, the reading of "The Pit and the Pendulum" is highlighted as a problematic illustration of the arabesque state.9In bibliographic Poe studies essays and in the criticism itself, The Rationale of Deception in Poe is regularly recognized as significant for its argument and scope.10 I see Jerome McGann's Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel as a kind of follow-up to what is best in Ketterer's book.11 Both studies revitalize interest in Poe's broader aesthetic project. Ketterer's first sentence identifies Poe as "without a doubt the most universally admired" of "all American writers" (xi).12 Ketterer then addresses the misalignment between his global reputation and status in his native nation, a factor that seemingly motivated this work. Still, this book is less significant for its cast of the "American Face of Edgar Allan Poe" than for its presentation of what may be key to Poe's global appeal.13 While claims for universality rightly should be treated with suspicion, Ketterer's focus on deception, reality, the arabesque, and fusion helps map "the desire of the moth for the star" across Poe's catalogue.14