Reviewed by:

• The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science by John Tresch
• Anton Borst (bio)

In John Tresch’s The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science, Poe’s famous horror tales like “The Fall of the House of Usher” form but one phase of a rich literary career, rather than its apogee. That honor falls to a text typically overlooked by the general reader: Eureka, Poe’s sprawling, strange, and—as Tresch shows—scientifically informed attempt to explain nothing short of everything. In its opening pages, Poe himself promises “to take such a survey of the Universe that the mind may be able really to receive and to perceive an individual impression,” a palpable sense, presumably, of the contrary forces Poe believed were responsible for all existence: attraction and repulsion. Combining powerful flights of poetic intuition with current scientific ideas, Eureka, writes Tresch, was “a mess: a serious mess, a glorious mess, but a mess” (p. 305), but was nevertheless viewed by Poe as “the culmination of his writings, his dreams, and his ill-starred life” (p. 8)—and indeed, it appeared the year before Poe’s death. It thus serves Tresch as the guiding telos for telling the story of the writer’s troubled life.

While retreading familiar biographical ground (Poe’s fraught relationship with foster father John Allan, his bouts with poverty and drunkenness, his success with “The Raven”), Tresch places new emphasis on Poe’s persistent interest in science, while sketching out the broader scientific milieu Poe inevitably absorbed as a culturally engaged nineteenth-century urbanite (the itinerant Poe lived in Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York). In his late teens and early twenties, Poe trained and served in the military, first in the US Army before enrolling at West Point, where he excelled in the highly regulated curriculum of mathematics and science. Tresch suggests the roots of Poe’s understanding of literary composition as an engineer and artificer, rather than inspired Romantic lyricist, lie here.

After turning from his officer training to pursue a literary career in magazines, Poe writes about enough science publications and discoveries to be considered “one of America’s first science reporters” (p. 132). Tresch, however, seems less interested in specific scientific ideas than how broader questions of a cultural, epistemological, and cosmological nature influenced Poe’s work—questions largely defined by the emergent, unregulated status of science in antebellum America. During Poe’s life, science was moving uncertainly from the amateur gentlemen’s clubs of the 1700s [End Page 495] to what would become the self-regulating, officially sanctioned institutions of today. What made the move uncertain, of course, were the currents of Barnumesque sensationalism and quackery coursing through popular culture, which sometimes exploited the trappings of science to lend credibility to spectacles and sideshows. Scientists like Joseph Henry and Alexander Dallas Bache—who lived in Philadelphia during the same time as Poe, Tresch notes—railed against the “humbug” they saw threatening scientific authority and labored to set up national institutions exclusive to professional scientists, cut off from the public and its demands for sensation. At several points, Tresch interrupts his story of Poe to describe Henry and Bache’s efforts, which led to the establishment of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Smithsonian Institution.

What does this have to do with Poe? Tresch argues that what Poe himself called the “science” of criticism he applied, on objective and rational grounds, to the similar end of enforcing literary standards to establish a national literary culture (p. 161). Tresch also teases out themes of scientific method and observation in stories like “A Descent into the Maelstrom” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” as well as in Poe’s detective stories featuring Dupin, who demonstratively utilizes logic and method to solve his first mystery, and probabilistic reasoning in his second. The biographical format of the book strains at such points: the readings of individual texts might...

审核人：

• 黑夜的原因：埃德加·爱伦·坡和约翰·特雷施的美国科学的锻造
• 安东·博斯特（生物）

在约翰·特雷施 (John Tresch) 的《黑夜的原因：埃德加·爱伦·坡 (Edgar Allan Poe) 和美国科学的锻造》中，坡著名的恐怖故事，例如《厄舍府的倒塌》，只是丰富文学生涯的一个阶段，而不是它的顶峰. 这一荣誉落在了一般读者通常忽略的文本：尤里卡，坡的庞大、奇怪，并且——正如 Tresch 所展示的——科学地试图解释一切。在其开篇的几页中，坡本人承诺“对宇宙进行这样的调查，以使心灵能够真正接收和感知个人印象”，大概是坡认为对一切负有责任的相反力量的一种明显感觉存在：吸引和排斥。结合强大的诗意直觉与当前的科学思想，尤里卡，Tresch 写道，“一团糟：一团糟，一团糟，一团糟，但一团糟”（第 305 页），但仍被坡视为“他的著作、他的梦想和他不幸的生活的顶峰” （第 8 页）——事实上，它出现在坡去世的前一年。因此，它为 Tresch 提供了指导性的目的，以讲述作家的困境生活的故事。

在重读熟悉的传记背景（坡与养父约翰·艾伦的紧张关系，他与贫困和酗酒的斗争，他在《乌鸦》中的成功）的同时，特雷施重新强调坡对科学的持续兴趣，同时勾勒出更广泛的科学环境坡不可避免地被吸收为文化参与的 19 世纪都市人（流动的坡住在巴尔的摩、里士满、费城和纽约）。在他十几岁和二十出头的时候，坡在军队训练和服役，首先是在美国陆军，然后进入西点军校，在那里他在高度规范的数学和科学课程中表现出色。Tresch 认为，坡将文学创作理解为工程师和技工，而不是受启发的浪漫主义作词家，其根源在于这里。

在从军官培训转向杂志文学生涯后，坡写了足够多的科学出版物和发现，被认为是“美国第一批科学记者之一”（第 132 页）。然而，Tresch 似乎对具体的科学思想没有兴趣，而是对文化、认识论和宇宙论性质的更广泛问题如何影响坡的工作感兴趣——这些问题主要由战前美国新兴的、不受管制的科学状况定义。在坡的一生中，科学正从 1700 年代的业余绅士俱乐部中摇摆不定[完第 495 页]到今天的自我监管、官方认可的机构。当然，让这一举动变得不确定的是巴纳马式的耸人听闻和庸医在流行文化中的潮流，它们有时会利用科学的陷阱来为奇观和杂耍提供可信度。Tresch 指出，像约瑟夫·亨利和亚历山大·达拉斯·巴奇这样的科学家——他们与坡同时住在费城——抨击他们认为威胁科学权威的“骗子”，并努力建立专门为专业科学家服务的国家机构，与公众及其对轰动的要求。有好几次，特雷施打断了他关于坡的故事，描述了亨利和巴赫的努力，

这和坡有什么关系？Tresch 认为，坡本人称之为批评的“科学”，他基于客观和理性的理由，用于执行文学标准以建立国家文学文化的类似目的（第 161 页）。Tresch 还梳理了《A Descent into the Maelstrom》和《The Tell-Tale Heart》等故事中的科学方法和观察主题，以及 Poe 的侦探故事中的 Dupin，他示范性地利用逻辑和方法解决了他的第一个谜团，并在他的第二个中进行概率推理。这本书的传记格式在这样的点上紧张：个别文本的阅读可能......