Nick Mamatas:
Imagine the school board meeting — the kids are reading some dangerous literature in English class. Murder, drunkenness, torture, madness, and not even a sliver of moral instruction. If the students weren’t already so resentful, they might even like what they’ve been given to read, it’s so cool. Imagine the class discussion about the theme of, say, “The Cask of Amontillado,” and that one boy with a heavy metal T-shirt in the back finally joining the conversation with his interpretation: “Some motherfuckers just have it comin’.”
Great things—themes, symbols, imagery, what have you—can be in writing without readers having to work at seeing something there. There’s something to the simplicity of the assertion that “Poe’s triumph is that he portrayed evil without finally blinking and cobbling together some minor moral triumph or life lesson at the end of his tales.” It’s not wrong.
Anyway, a few years old, but still great. I loves (and respects) me some Edgar Allan Poe.
(American poet. Born in eighteen hundred and nine.)
(Also, yes, I know I posted about this article a while back, but I wanted to revisit it.)
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continentalop posted this
