Vigorous Currents, Painful Archives: The Production of Affect and History in Poe’s “Tale of the Ragged Mountains”

Abstract

A s we turn to the question of pain in Poe, we might return to Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood, which describes how effectively his mother’s stories drained away all of his morbid symptoms.1 Given the relief attributed to the “vigorous current” of those tales, we could ask if the current coursing through Poe’s work also targets some feverish pain abroad in the land of his upbringing. Many scholars now find Poe’s engagement with painful issues of his day undeniable, particularly as they relate to traumas of slavery and the racism driving imperialism at home and abroad. Yet those same scholars continue to debate how to interpret that engagement, particularly when it takes the indirect, ghoulish, and splenetic form so characteristic of his work. If some still question whether Poe was a racist, most assume that some degree or kind of racism was unavoidable for a man of his time. While initially useful, efforts to pinpoint Poe’s position on the spectrum of racist ideologies of his day have been superseded by recognition that his writing constitutes an archive with broad implications for an anatomy of racism’s conflicted and contested operations.2 Poe exposes slavery’s impact well beyond the experience of its most immediate victims and perpetrators, and this extended traumatic environment generates a range of response whose effects are worth studying with care. This last is particularly the case when we discover how often the vigorous currents of Poe’s work invite us to consider the broader traumatic relays alive in their very production. Thus if we consider the deeper resonances of Benjamin’s association between storytelling and pain, we may find another way to approach some of the