Bestselling author Lyndsay Faye discusses Edgar Allan Poe and his use of loss and negative space in compelling fiction.

After I read LYNDSAY FAYE’s take on Poe’s fiction, I thought it appropriate to share given my recent post about Poe’s death anniversary.

Here’s what Lyndsay had to say:

I stand before you in defense of nothing! Charles Seife wrote in Zero: the Biography of a Dangerous Idea, “The biggest questions in science and religion are about nothingness and eternity, the void and the infinite, zero and infinity.” 

Therefore how natural that every form of art makes use of both what is and is not visible. Pauses in music … blanks on canvas … stillness in dance. And since transforming inert words into three-dimensional motion, sound, imagery, and feeling is undoubtedly an art form, the writer must therefore also attend to not only what is set down, but what is omitted.

We are not speaking of edits. This art of negative space goes far beyond our sacred advice sometimes the delete key is your best friend (sometimes a delete bulldozer is your bosom comrade, which I discover novel after novel by scrapping at least 20,000 words from the first draft). Our focus here is rather on what the Japanese term ma: the possibilities tingling within emptiness—the lack that makes the reader crave—the eclipse delineating the sun. 

The cavity from which Edgar Allan Poe, one of America’s most renowned early authors, drew his greatest effects.

My favorite Poe short story launches its gleeful nightmare straight from the maw of negative space. Indeed, “The Fall of the House of Usher” relies so heavily on nothing that the estate’s shattered relics are literally swallowed into the tarn in the infamous conclusion. But let us instead study its opening lines, the words Poe selects to set his largely empty stage:

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.

From the curtain’s rising, we flounder in a blank atmosphere: Rather than lightning-streaked portents, we are given dull darkness; instead of thunderclaps, the afternoon is altogether sans noise. Clouds obscure the skies, our hero is unaccompanied, the countryside is bleak. Yet every word of this non-description of setting is precious, for how unnerving is it that there is nothing of significance to describe at all? While our traveler practically drowns in vacancy, we as readers are strangely intrigued, next to be treated to “vacant eye-like windows,” arguably far more uncanny than eye-like windows watching our hero’s every movement.

Lest we forget: I must refer to him sideways, as “the protagonist,” or “our chronicler,” since the narrator is never graced with a moniker. The nameless raconteur battles the missing throughout this classic work. His friend Roderick Usher, who called for aid? “His reserve had always been excessive and habitual.” The Usher line itself? No branches, no in-laws, just a matched set of spectacularly uncheerful siblings. The estate’s servants? “a valet, of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence…” And Roderick’s problem? “I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect—in terror … in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR.”

We know the moral that there is nothing to fear but Fear itself: In Poe, however, while “The Fall of the House of Usher” is clothed in the same argument, another critically apt reading would be that there is nothing to fear but Nothing. Poe’s poetry is famous, not to say infamous, upon this subject—what doth the Raven quoth so tauntingly but nevermore, nevermore? But myriad other examples are relentlessly woven throughout his prolific canon. I particularly love the miniature ode to loss at the opening of “To M—,” published in 1829:

O! I care not that my earthly lot—
Hath—little of Earth in it—
That years of love have been forgot—
In the fever of a minute—

Or consider, equally preoccupied with the want of key facts, “Ulalume—A Ballad”:

Our talk had been serious and sober,
But our thoughts they were palsied and sere—
Our memories were treacherous and sere;
For we knew not the month was October,
And we marked not the night of the year—

What so touched Poe about negative space? Famously, his personal missing pieces were myriad and transfiguring. The author lost his father in infancy when David Poe, a traveling actor like Edgar’s mother Eliza, abandoned his family. The fatal drowning in open air to which so many succumbed—tuberculosis, or the “White Plague”—robbed Edgar of his mother merely a year later, and in his mid-20s the same disease cruelly stole his beloved child-bride cousin Virginia. 

It is tragic that Poe lacked family, but they were hardly his sole want; he lacked affection from his foster father John Allan, not to mention official adoption papers; he lacked steady employment, often; he therefore spectacularly suffered a lifelong lack of money; he frequently lacked the acclaim he felt was his due. Naturally, we find these themes of holes riddling the work he so frenziedly produced attempting to forge a career—to create from nothing a place in the early American literary pantheon.

My eighth novel, Raven, is not a pastiche of any particular Poe work (though it is structured according to “The Fall of the House of Usher”) but rather mingles the tragic horrors of his entire canon with the aching losses of his biography. Capturing the emptiness he both battled and sought to capture was thus crucial for me in writing the antebellum biography of Raven Helen Allan—like Poe an unwanted orphan and addict of self-destruction. She writes at the opening, “I died a fortnight ago this coming Thursday. It was a terrifically unpleasant experience—being murdered, I mean to say.” Her posthumous autobiography (or is it?) proves rife with losses, and when she is forced to take employment as a paid companion in the foreboding woodlands outside of Baltimore in a disintegrating mansion, she risks everything to tear aside the masks she encounters and reveal the Legrand cousins’ harrowing secrets.

Fascination with the void was of course not new to Poe. Saint Augustine, trying to conceptualize the chaotic pre-Creation abyss in his Confessions, described, “It was not absolute nothingness. It was a kind of formlessness without any definition … True reasoning convinced me that I should wholly subtract all remnants of every kind of form if I wished to conceive the absolutely formless. I could not achieve this.” 

Neither could Edgar Allan Poe, nor did he attempt to—nevertheless, it is in his adoration of the unreachable that we find some of his truest writing. Perhaps the finest example of his reverence for the intangible is found in “Ligeia,” when he wrote in the year 1838:

There is no point, among the many incomprehensible anomalies of the science of the mind, more thrillingly exciting than the fact—never, I believe, noted in the schools—in our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.

Thanks, Lyndsay! My thoughts: Even though Poe had his mind and imagination somewhere in another universe (Twilight Zone, perhaps?), he is still regarded as one of our most creative and mysterious writers of all time. Time and circumstances permitting, I wish I could have met him. That would be one hell of a conversation, especially over a glass of cognac!

Hopefully making a ruckus, one blog post at a time!

Be sure to check out my other blog,Joe’s Journey, for selected short stories and personal insights on life and its detours.