Insurgent poets

Thank you Cécile and Stephan, for your very interesting contributions! (see comments on the Poe post below).  I’ll put a reply here. I’m not sure what Poe means by placing this story within his story. What is clear, as you have said, is that the creation of the painting has been brought about at the expense of its subject and, I would say, through the disconnection of the artist from his source of inspiration. Is Poe saying this is the nature of art itself, that it is a danger to our relationship to reality at the same time as being a representation of it ?

Poe’s imaginative world is in many ways close to Baudelaire’s. As was said in a previous post, Nature in its broadest sense, the phenomenal world, from being a place of succour for the Romantic, and in much traditional Western art before the modern age, a reflection of spirtual presence, even a theophany, has become ‘sublimated’ into an imaginative world. This imaginative world in Baudelaire becomes ‘artificial’, a place of refuge from a reality perhaps too difficult to bear, or at least too grey and one-dimensional, a place of disenchantment. In this sense, finding le fleur in or from le mal is the act of sublimating what is ugly, sinister, bleak, into a new creation - as Poe does in this story, through his description of the castle and the telling of the tale within the tale. It is an act which fails in the incipit of The Fall of the House of Usher. The narrator, facing the terrible house at the beginning of the story hopes, ‘It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression’. But the small lake in front of it only reflects back, inverted, the same horror. 

 

The destructive artist of The Oval Portrait brings to mind Plato’s own wariness of the poets. In The Republic, he would exclude those who show disrespect for the gods, but also because the poet/artist abstracts from reality. In Plato’s view, the phenomenal world is already ‘at one remove’ from the divine substratum which upholds and is reflected through it. Artistic representation is thus a representation of a representation. Poets deal with appearances, not reality.

But the artist is also a sort of Promethean figure, a hero, a rebel who risks all to take the fire from the gods for the benefit of mankind. His vision takes him into dangerous territory – he adopts the role of God as creator, he is dangerous, dangerous to society, even to himself. One only has to think of the great number of seriously disturbed artists over the centuries. It is as if the vision is sometimes too great to behold, and disconnection from reality can result from this high-risk leap into the creative act. Reality might be the raw material from which the work is forged, but do we sometimes lose sight of it in the process ?