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Remembrance
and Healing in Poe's Narratives Jeffrey
J. Folks
Neurologist Oliver Sacks, author of such best-selling medical narratives as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, has documented the healing effects of narratives of remembrance. In the process that Sacks proposes, the suffering human being is returned to the "center," no longer the object of treatment but the subject of narrative. Poe's finest biographer, Kenneth Silverman, in Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance has documented a similar but less successful attempt at narrative displacement of grief in the many stories and poems that Poe wrote in relation to the loss of his mother. The creative process of "personhood" that Sacks alludes to is clearly the obsessive center of Poe' s writing, and his many narratives of psychological disturbance (such as "William Wilson," "The Black Cat," and "The Fall of the House of Usher") may be regarded as an attempt at holistic self-treatment. Poe developed an elaborate theory of the relation of childhood survivors in relation to the dead, in which acts of commemoration are necessary to expiate one's guilt at survival and to ensure the continued love of the lost beloved, yet Poe's sense of the necessity of expiation involved him in a destructive process of fantasy creation. Ultimately, it was necessary for Poe to perceive death itself as "beautiful" and to attempt communication with the dead through various forms of mysticism. Gradually, in Poe's relation to the dead, the therapeutic attempt at creation of personhood was replaced by a fearful sense of "haunting" and a flight from the dangerous return of repressed guilt. As in cases of survivor guilt documented by Robert Jay Lifton, Poe experienced the trauma of self-torture and blame, but he was never able to fully understand his own condition or to recover from it. On the contrary, his worsening condition led to ever-increasing bouts of emotional despair and creative paralysis.
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