this is really important

This is an awesome idea!

Sarah "Sally" Hemings (c. 1773 – 1835) was a slave owned by Jefferson and probably mother of five of his children. There is a "growing historical consensus" among scholars that Jefferson had a long-term relationship with Sally Hemings. [Wikipedia contributors, “Sarah ‘Sally’ Hemings”]

"But in many ways buries the history further. There's an argument in cultural criticism that I won't be able to fully articulate here but goes something like this: post-structuralism and other critical modes arise, ostensibly in defense of those who have long been silenced by dominant systems. But they also arise precisely at the time when the downtrodden are attempting to access those systems directly: fighting for independence as a nation, for example, or fighting for the right to vote. It seems a convenient time for the powerful to say that those structures are meaningless (Have Jeff check me on all this, but I always found this a compelling angle--came to me in the study of Native American literature, which surprisingly for me at first, was deeply concerned with sovereignty at a time when I had been reading about how bad the concept and practice of "the nation" was)" [Jeremy Dean via email].

Laverna was the Roman goddess of thieves, imposters and frauds.

After likening the ineffectual Prefect of the Parisian police to the Bostonian emblem of trade and wealth, Poe’s apostrophe from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Nouvelle Heloise becomes a commentary on New England politics.

This is very hard on the Massachusetts House of Representatives, but Laverna is the Prefect at worst. At best, he brings us back to Jefferson, because the codfish as a symbol of the representatives of the people of the United States of America, who declared that all men are created equal, has “one master stroke of cant” – to ‘deny what is’ – chattel slavery – and ‘explain what is not’ – the values of freedom and liberty.

Dupin's comparison of the Prefect of the Parisian police to a codfish is not just a convenient figure of speech. Poe is giving the reader a clue which makes explicit his use of animal symbolism, for if a codfish is the prefect, who is the ape? Poe’s stories are always carefully balanced, and this story pushes the reader to use the deductive skills Poe eulogizes as he introduces Dupin and understand that animals represent humans.

The codfish simile also transports the story to the other side of the Atlantic. With a brilliantly subtle stroke Poe likens the well-meaning but inept Parisian official to the emblem of Massachusetts government. Poe’s fellow Bostonians may have picked up on his sarcastic use of the ‘Sacred Cod Fish’, a carved wooden effigy that hung in the Boston Old State House from 1784, when John Rowe, merchant, smuggler, slave dealer, politician and the man who shipped the cargo of tea thrown overboard in the Boston Tea Party, “moved the house that leave might be given to hang up the representation of a Cod Fish in the room where the house sit, as a memorial of the importance of Cod-Fishery to the welfare of this Commonwealth.” The committee quotes John Adams as saying that the New England fisheries “were to us what wool was to England or tobacco to Virginia – the great staple which became the basis of power and wealth” A History of the Emblem of the Codfish in the Hall of the House of Representatives 21]. The Cod Fish had appeared as early as 1661 on the seal of the Plymouth Land Company. From 1686 it was on a Court seal. In 1755 it was on a two penny tax stamp, surrounded by the legend “Staple of Massachusetts” [A History of the Emblem 34-35].

A Committee of the House, Comp.. A History of the Emblem of the Codfish in the Hall of the House of Representatives. Boston: Wright and Potter, 1895. Library of Congress F73.8.S8 M42. https://archive.org/details/historyofemblemo00mass

Poe drew on slave insurrections to write a story that would strike horror in the hearts of his American readers. Many of Poe’s stories of terror repeatedly bestialize the slave in nightmare scenarios that describe the end of the Old World and the onset of bloody Chaos. Poe perversely embraces this downfall with a sort of glee, perhaps because he had been cast out of the Southern ‘aristocratic’ sphere he coveted. In “Murders”, well removed from the South, Dupin says what an apologist cannot say: that an African would have a motive for murder. Poe is saying, to many of his readers’ horror, that the enslaved ‘beast’ is not mere chattel but instead a rational human capable of planning and carrying out organized insurrection. If the beast is human the logic of slavery is untenable.

These screams “loud… drawn out… not short and quick… long… loud… loud… quick… unequal” bring a powerful physicality to the suddenly crowded Paris night. It sounds like rape. Combined with the mutilation, we have a scene of real horror, a crime that could only be committed by a madman, or - a beast. But it would have to be a beast with fingers, which could throttle and wield a razor like a man. Like Turner, the Ourang-Outang steals its white master’s weapon and uses it to kill whites.

Turner participates in a ‘Rue Morgue’ situation in Confessions which reads like a rehearsal for what happens afterwards at Mrs. Whitehead’s. Again, two defenseless white women are alone in an isolated room and the first is killed with one blow of Will’s axe. Here Turner – who hasn’t killed anyone yet - is almost gentle with the second victim:

"I took Mrs. Newsome by the hand, and with the sword I had when I was apprehended, I struck her several blows over the head, but not being able to kill her, as the sword was dull. Will turning around and discovering it, despatched her also" [12]

Turner was a great revolutionary but a poor killer. Holding the lady by the hand and attempting to bash her skull in with a blunt sword must have filled the drawing room with her screams, but Turner prefers not to dwell on cries of anguish.

In “Murders” Poe more than makes up for Turner’s silence by introducing noise, and with it a powerfully sexual dimension not explicit in Confessions. In “Murders”, the neighborhood gendarme says he heard

"…screams of some person (or persons) in great agony – (the screams) were loud and drawn out, not short and quick" [248].

Another passer by heard shrieks for ten full minutes, and says that they were “long and loud – very awful and distressing.”

whip of the slave-driver

Poe’s narrator says that the dumb brute’s purposes were “probably pacific," but observes that it becomes aroused when the old lady struggles and screams at its touch, so it pulls out her hair.

The bed, so symbolic of marriage, is the central motif around which Poe’s sadistic fantasy rotates. The Ourang-Outang symbolically destroys the ornaments of civilization as it smashes the furniture, then throws the bed “into the middle” of the debris-covered floor. The sailor, who has climbed up the lightning rod but lacks the agility to leap onto the window sill, is outside looking in over the head of the “unwieldy bedstead” which stands hard up by the window frame, like a voyeur. The disempowered master, the defenseless women and the lusty, manic beast are tensed in a triangle around the symbolic bed. The women are in their night gowns, the mother interrupted when combing her long grey hair - a traditional symbol of female sexuality – which the ourang-outang afterwards pulls out by the roots in bloody “tresses.”

Turner’s Miss Margaret conceals herself under the cellar cap, another chimney-like place. Miss Margaret is the only person Turner actually kills. The killing is described very matter-of-factly, with none of the gnashing and flashing Poe introduces. Turner explains that

"…on my approach she fled, but was soon overtaken, and after repeated blows with a sword, I killed her by a blow on the head, with a fence rail" [Confessions 32].

While his subdued language downplays the brutality of the deed, Turner in effect beats Miss Margaret to death. In both “Murders” and Confessions isolated white women are surprised and murdered by dark-skinned males at night, in their beds. The overwhelmingly sexual dimension of the violence in these situations is one of the things that people most feared. Ourang-Outangs were believed to lust after (and perhaps mate with?) African women, and African men to prefer whites. According to Thomas Jefferson, white beauty is reinforced by blacks’

"…own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species" [Notes on the State of Virginia 149].

Most mulattoes had black mothers, I believe. White men were nevertheless obsessed with the idea that black men – according to Jefferson “more ardent with their female” [Notes 150] - wanted white women. Walker scornfully retorts that

"I would wish, candidly, however, before the Lord, to be understood, that I would not give a pinch of snuff to be married to any white person I ever saw in all the days of my life. And I do say it, that the black man, or man of color, who will leave his own color (provided he can get one who is good for any thing) and marry a white woman, to be a double slave to her just because she is white, ought to be treated by her as he surely will be, viz; as a niger!!!" [Appeal 19]

Turner’s accomplice “Will, the executioner” uses an axe. Like Poe's Ourang-Outang he seizes his victim and almost decapitates her. Turner tells Gray that

"I saw Will pulling Mrs. Whitehead out of the house, and at the step he nearly severed her head from her body [Confessions 31]"

Decapitation is common, but nearly severing a head from a body is a less frequent occurrence. This not-quite-cutting-it-off draws a direct parallel between Poe’s ape and Turner’s slave.

Poe may have specifically had Turner’s executions of Mrs. Whitehead and her daughter Margaret in mind, for in both “Murders” and Confessions the mother meets her instant death before the daughter’s eyes. In both narratives the daughter is killed next. At the beginning of the killing spree Turner goes up a ladder to get into the first victim’s house through a window. Poe’s Ourang-Outang climbs up a lightning rod and enters through a window. In both stories the first victim is killed in the same way. The Ourang-Outang seizes Madame l’Espanaye and uses a razor.

Turner and his men insurrected in the dead of night; Poe’s Ourang-Outang enters its victims’ apartment at three in the morning.

Ed White notes that the layers of secrecy and fear that permeate Southern slavery are recreated in the enclosed quality of everything that happens in “Murders”. We find the same creepy box-offed atmosphere in the isolated houses of the Cross Keys neighborhood where Turner’s rebellion took place.

Poe sets “Murders” in Paris to give his ape more freedom of speech.

Here the two white men sensually embrace darkness in a gesture of voluptuous amalgamation, for Dupin is “enamored of the Night.” Like vampires, they only venture forth after dark, and close all the shutters at sunrise to create with the weak light of perfumed tapers a simulacrum of what the narrator calls the “sable divinity.” Black, white, dark, light - all these words were heavily loaded with racial significance in 19th century America, where editorial censure made some stories uneasy to place.

One of the last outposts of an old world aristocracy.

Dupin, who embodies reason and logic, is the quintessential Enlightenment man graced with Romantic vision, moving in a strangely empty Paris that no longer accommodates the aristocratic values it had once cradled.

In 1841, the slave Nat Turner took justice into his hands and led the first successful slave insurrection in US history. Ten years later, Edgar Allan Poe pushed against Turner by re-bestializing blacks in his brilliantly subversive “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). In this story, largely about a civilization struggling with forces it no longer controls, an escaped ourang-outang in Paris represents the insurgent slave. Poe’s equation between primates and blacks was a widespread and convenient apologist slur in the nineteenth-century United States.

My reading of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is indebted to “The ourang-outang situation” by Edward Higgins White, who reads “Murders” as Poe’s response to slave insurrections. While researching I found a wealth of recent scholarship that explores Poe and race, but none that points to the parallels between Poe’s “Murders” and Turner’s Confessions that I locate in these margins.

Temporal and geographical circumstances support the possibility that Poe had Turner in mind when he wrote "Murders," for although Poe was living in Baltimore at the time of Turner’s insurrection, but he moved back to Richmond VA, where he had spent a large part of his childhood, in 1834, seven years before Turner's rebellion. The ‘Southampton massacre’ thus hit very close to Poe’s home, and with characteristic reactionary bent, Poe responds to slave uprisings and abolitionist discourse by dehumanizing the slave through representing him as an Ourang-Outang.

Mr. Jefferson's very severe remarks on us have been so extensively argued upon by men whose attainments in literature, I shall never be able to reach, that I would not have meddled with it, were it not to solicit each of my brethren, who has the spirit of a man, to buy a copy of Mr. Jefferson's "Notes on Virginia," and put it in the hand of his son. For let no one of us suppose that the refutations which have been written by our white friends are enough--they are whites--we are blacks. We, and the world wish to see the charges of Mr. Jefferson refuted by the blacks themselves, according to their chance; for we must remember that what the whites have written respecting this subject, is other men's labours, and did not emanate from the blacks. I know well, that there are some talents and learning among the coloured people of this country, which we have not a chance to develope, in consequence of oppression; but our oppression ought not to hinder us from acquiring all we can. For we will have a chance to develope them by and by. God will not suffer us, always to be oppressed. Our sufferings will come to an end, in spite of all the Americans this side of eternity. Then we will want all the learning and talents among ourselves, and perhaps more, to govern ourselves.--"Every dog must have its day," the American's is coming to an end [David Walker, "Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World" 17-18].

I call upon the philanthropist, I call upon the very tyrant himself, to show me a page of history, either sacred or profane, on which a verse can be found, which maintains, that the Egyptians heaped the insupportable insult upon the children of Israel by telling them that they were not of the human family. Can the whites deny this charge? Have they not, after having reduced us to the deplorable condition of slaves under their feet, held us up as descending originally from the tribes of Monkeys or Orang-Outangs? (…) - Has Mr. Jefferson declared to the world, that we are inferior to the whites, both in the endowments of our bodies and of minds? It is indeed surprising, that a man of such great learning, combined with such excellent natural parts, should speak so of a set of men in chains [David Walker, "Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World," 21].

See your declaration, Americans!! Do you understand your own language? Hear your language, proclaimed to the world, July 4, 1776—

"We hold these truths to be self evident—that ALL MEN are created EQUAL!” …)

[David Walker, "Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World," 86]

Compare your own language above, extracted from your Declaration of Independence, with your cruelties and murders inflicted by your cruel and unmerciful fathers on ourselves on our fathers and on us, men who have never given your fathers or you the least provocation!!!

[David Walker, "Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World," 86-87]

This exchange builds to the best description of unlimited love I know.

Isn't a president supposed to know the law, or at least enough of the law to know when he should get expert legal opinion?

An amazing tool. I'm thrilled that I have it in my WordPress site. Thank you CUNY Academic Commons!

I wonder what the record number of annotations of a word or phrase is.

I assume Solon-Crane didn't have to go to work. :(

But the World Wide Web is not linear, so the reading list that search engines give us is ordered by most viewed pages. We are therefore in theory all authors of the compendium. In practice, I fear the guides to knowledge provided by search engines are largely compiled by bots.

Another notable example of an ambitious encyclopedic work is Kitab-al Firhist by Ibn al-Nadim (d. 995 or 998 CE).

Here Melville reminds us of the unreliability of the narrative voice and directs us to read between the lines. Only so much escaped censorship in 19th Century American periodicals. Because Melville needed to publish, he chose to write the story of a slave rebellion in “Benito Cereno” from the perspective of a biased narrator, in language charged with racism. He then tells the story again as a dry factual report of Don Benito’s deposition at the Spanish court at Peru, from which we learn that the slaves were not dumb beasts but intelligent, organized humans who wanted to go home to Senegal. The second version undermines the first, and the reader has to decide for herself what happened and why.

The cadence of this passage reminds me of Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" (1952):

"The clouds over the land now rose like mountains and the coast was only a long green line with the gray blue hills behind it. The water was a dark blue now, so dark that it was almost purple. As he looked down into it he saw the red sifting of the plankton in the dark water and the strange light the sun made now. He watched his lines to see them go straight down out of sight into the water and he was happy to see so much plankton because it meant fish. The strange light the sun made in the water, now that the sun was higher, meant good weather and so did the shape of the clouds over the land. But the bird was almost out of sight now and nothing showed on the surface of the water but some patches of yellow, sun-bleached Sargasso weed and the purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war floating close beside the boat." [Project Gutenberg]

Footnote in Norton critical edition tells us that an important source for Benito Cereno is Chapter 18 of Amasa Delano's Narrative of Voyages and Travels, in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (Boston, 1817). Melville changed 1805 (the year of the events related in Delano's chapter 18, I assume) to 1799. The Haitian Revolution took place from 1791 to 1804. Is this why 1799? The Norton footnote also notes that Melville changed the names of the ships from The Perseverance and The Tryal to Bachelor's Delight and San Dominick [34]. The latter is surely a reference to Sainte Domingue.

So I looked up "aletheological" and it's - duh - "of or pertaining to aletheology," according to Your Dictionary. I wanted a more authoritative source so I looked for aletheology in Wiktionary, but not there. Hm. Word doesn't exist if not in Wiktionary, right? Unless it's in Wikipedia, which it is. Aletheology is not in online OED. Anyway, to get to the point, aletheological means - more or less - epistemological.

I like the thought of breaking text. When there is no one author we do away with the idea of genius, which is a good thing.

Eeeeegh! Yeesh, ugh, uff. Hm. OK, lemme see. The work - the literary work - is a fragment of what substance? The larger substance of the disciplines, of knowledge? The Text with a capital T is a field. The field of textual studies? So Text straddles disciplines like Marc Anthony bestrid the ocean in Cleopatra's eyes (A&C 5.2). Text thus brings the disciplines, which had been theretofore classified into separate containers of sorts, together to become in text something new? I'm thinking out loud.

Ah, so some texts are not texts? The Wikipedia entry on Roland Barthes distinguishes "readerly texts" from "writerly texts."

What are we to understand as a "literary work?" Seminal texts by, for example, Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Levi-Strauss, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud (to name one from each discipline Barthes goes on to list) are literary works. Defining these as non-literary works to be contained in distinct disciplinary fields is an artificial separation.

I'm selecting these two words to see what an annotation looks like.