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The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science
Bottom of the pile
18
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
19/100Critics
17/100Scholars
Author:
John Tresch
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date:
June 15, 2021
Shining a spotlight on an era when the lines separating entertainment, speculation, and scientific inquiry were blurred, Tresch reveals Edgar Allan Poe's obsession with science and lifelong ambition to advance and question human knowledge. Even as Poe composed dazzling works of fiction, he remained an avid and often combative commentator on new discoveries, publishing and hustling in literary scenes that also hosted the era's most prominent scientists, semi-scientists, and pseudo-intellectual rogues.
What The Reviewers Say
Tresch packs quite a lot into his book—there’s even an ingenious deconstruction of the title page of Poe’s nautical novel, the macabre and tantalizingly enigmatic 'Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.' Still, prospective readers of The Reason for the Darkness of the Night should be aware that it isn’t a sustained, detailed exposition of Poe’s life so much as a rich assemblage of biographical vignettes, brief story analyses and mini-essays on the era’s scientific beliefs. In general, Tresch’s overall thesis—that Poe’s 'deep familiarity with science was the fulcrum on which his thought balanced'—seems unarguable, given the presence of the 'ratiocinative' in so much of what he wrote. Yet, ultimately, it is Poe’s other aspect, his ability to convey monomaniacal intensity, verging on hysteria, that we are drawn to, his gift for expressing what D.H. Lawrence floridly called 'the prismatic ecstasy of heightened consciousness.'.
Rather than feeling like a dive into minutiae or a specialist’s niche, Tresch’s approach manages to open up the world of Poe’s writing in an unexpectedly fascinating way. What emerges is how Poe’s interest in—and sometimes misunderstanding of—science drove some of his greatest works of horror. Anyone already familiar with Poe’s life will see all the same beats hit here.
Tresch’s luminous study situates Poe’s life and work in the context of the mid-nineteenth-century scientific revolution.
Mr. Tresch keeps to a steady course. He approaches Poe’s uncanny lecture—and its published version, the prose poem 'Eureka'—not as a crazy fever dream, but as an inspired series of leaps from a firm grounding in fact.
