Notes on "The Fall of the House of Usher"
"What was it--I paused to think--what was it that so unnerved me in contemplation of the House of Usher?"
what's not unnerving about the setting. but how colored are his descriptions by backward-glancing, writing his account after? does the House only look as it does through his current perception?
"There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition--for why should I not so term it?--served mainly to accelerate the increase itself."
what cements a feeling more -- which might otherwise have been fleeting, forgettable -- than recording it in writing
sight is fascinating in this story. around the House the sky is cloudy and the day is entering late evening when the narrator arrives, so a clear view of his surroundings is in these ways obscured. he notes his struggle to see the whole of Usher's rooms because of its eccentric architecture that curves unexpectedly, is full of odd angles and surprising recesses. the "inward" sight is present in such scenes as when he or Usher draw comparisons from books to their present straits, a dive into the mind that removes direct perception by coloring it with allusions or references intended to "clarify" their circumstances.
another line of vision is the House's. its windows are described as "eye-like" twice in the opening paragraph of the story. i think there's value in reading -- in a story that features doubling, mirroring duplication, in the form of identical twins -- "Usher" as a retelling of the Narcissus myth. the narrator spends the first few paragraphs of the story looking at the setting, not directly, but as it is reflected in the tarn near the House (which is also how he'll also look at it when he watches it collapse in the final paragraph). tarns are small pools of water on mountains that form from melted ice or snow, meaning, pointedly enough for this story, that they connect to no streams or bodies of water outside of themselves. this tarn is interesting because the House's "image [is] in the pool." and since it has, as the narrator repeats, "eye-like windows" this means the House (fixed, immobile building) is staring at itself.
through a pool darkly.
doubled self-annihilation is what connects Narcissus to "Usher."
according to Ovid: the birth of Narcissus, for whatever reason, displeased the gods. when his mother asked Teiresias whether her child would live a long, healthy life, the seer tells her he would, "so long as he never knows himself." what follows is well known. Narcissus forsakes the love that his beauty inspires in others around him, disregards it in favor of such activities as hunting which afford him more pleasure than sycophantic devotion. the nymph Echo falls in love with him. it is she who brings him to commit the prohibition that leads him to his destruction. she curses him for not reciprocating her love and calls on Nemesis to help her punish him. when next we meet Narcissus, he is lost. he has positioned himself forever before the small pool that shows him his reflection. he eventually withers away, not sleeping, not eating, but fading, and becomes the Narcissus flower.
a lovely transformation. but first he has to die.
the House, which has been staring at "its image in the pool" for who knows how long, collapses at the end of the story and the narrator watches as "the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the 'House of Usher.'" its "self," doubled in the water, goes down with it. the narrator witnesses the same thing happen with the Usher siblings just before this:
... there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold — then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.
I've heard poisoned fungi, opium usage, too impressionable narrator (for whom the dark night, the reading material, paired with Usher's, umm, personal interests were too much to bear), sexual abuse, vampires (that one's Angela Carter), and more to explain "Usher." i think fate, in the arbitrary, Greek sense that Narcissus knew it as, fits with them too.
here's a recording of the song Usher plays which the narrator holds "painfully in mind [as] a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber": Carl Gottlieb Reissiger: Weber's Last Waltz; Fairy Waltz. the "Last Waltz," now properly attributed to Reissiger, was long assumed to be Weber's since he copied his friend's composition out on a page which then became the song's only surviving manuscript.
Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.
I'm preserving this quotation solely due to Mario Praz who uses it to explain the scope of his analysis in The Romantic Agony. I think it's a good description of writing that has a narrowed focus; the scholar as an observer scrutinizing the crack.
