Configurations

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...