Entropic Imagination in Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death"Author(s): Hubert ZapfSource: College Literature, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Fall, 1989), pp. 211-218Published by: College LiteratureStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25111822Accessed: 20/03/2009 23:06

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ENTROPIC IMAGINATION IN POE'S "THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH"

by Hubert Zapf

4 ?'T1 1 he Masque of the Red Death" is one of the shortest and yet

best-known stories by Edgar Allan Poe. Its theme, other than the

cryptosymbolic worlds of sinister subjectivity in tales like "William

Wilson," "The Tell-Tale Heart" or "The Fall of the House of Usher," seems to have a more universal appeal and a more immediately

recognizable human significance. Compared with the sophisticated narra

tive techniques and the labyrinthine psychological complexities of those other stories the meaning and structure of "The Masque of the Red

Death" are, at least at first sight, relatively straightforward. In place of

symbolism, reflexivity and textual indeterminacy we have the clarity and

coherence of allegory; in place of innovation and experiment we have a

traditional form of narrative which strikes us as old-fashioned. In its theme of superbia and of the glory and fall of a prince, it reminds us of

medieval moral parables and of the tragic tales of human vanity and

pride which lead to inevitable punishment and damnation, as they are

exemplified, for instance, in the "Monk's Tale" of Chaucer's Canter

bury Tales. Furthermore, the plague, which Poe uses as a metaphor in

the story for the destruction of human hopes and illusions by the agency of a superhuman fate, and which is personified and becomes the

"spectral image"1 for the final emptiness and futility of earthly life, was

similarly seen as a scourge of God in the historical times of the Plague. It was seen?as it is in Poe's story?as a kind of metaphysical drama, an

apocalyptic memento mor? which forcefully reminded humans of their own mortality, purging them of their delusions and their hubris which,

212 COLLEGE LITERATURE

like an evil spirit, had possessed them. In the moral logic of the plot; in

the use of an allegorical figure as a central agent; in its ghost-like appearance at midnight; and in the apocalyptic imagination with which it is associated, confronting and destroying the power of the "Prince of this World"?in all of these elements the story quite heavily draws on

modes of story-telling which seem to belong to a distant past rather than to the contemporary context of Poe's own literary and cultural world.

What is the reason for this historical distancing, this aesthetic anachronism in the literary method of the story? What is its function and status in the overall composition of the text?

In speaking through the language and the imagery of a remote time, Poe tries to find a formal equivalent for the theme of his text, which is at the same time universal and temporal. It attempts to approach

archetypal truths of human nature and simultaneously dramatizes the

fact that these "truths" are indissolubly connected with their own

transitoriness, and with the continuous self-dissolution of the historical

forms in which human life and culture articulate themselves. A closer

look at the text reveals that the time-worn conventions of story-telling that Poe utilizes here are not employed in an "affirmative" sense but

that they are strangely inverted and turned against themselves in the course of the story. The deceptively straightforward surface of the

narration conceals a degree of textual complication which is in its way as

interesting and as modern as anything else that Poe wrote. It is like a

stylistic mask of the narrative which, like the masks of the figures in the

narrated world, simultaneously hides and discloses the disappearance of

its substance.

From here, the form of the story's composition can be seen as an

illustration of the entropie processes of existence, which articulate

themselves in the entropie processes of art. "Entropy"?which is a

mixtum compositum between the two Greek words energeia (energy) and

trope (transformation)?is the implication of the Second Law of Thermo

dynamics that all energy is continually transformed in a way in which

disorder increases at the expense of order in the material universe.2 "The

available energy will undergo the irresistible and irreversible process of

being degraded from useful to less useful forms until . . . maximum

entropy" is reached which is known as the "heat death" of the

universe.3 In the metaphorical world of Poe's fictional text, the

material side of this process is seen as inseparable from its immaterial,

i.e., its psychological and cultural side. Human life itself is seen in terms

ENTROPIC IMAGINATION 213

of a cultural artifact which contains in the specific way in which it

attempts to ensure its order the dynamics that continually increases its

disorder. It is shown to accelerate its self-consuming tendencies by the

very act of its intended "autonomization." The "Red Death" as the

determining agent of the text is not really an outside force but is inherent in the ways in which, by means of political power-structures and the

structures of artistic imagination, human life tries to become independent from the forces of chaos and annihilation surrounding it.4

This attempt of the autonomization of life through its transformation

into a cultural artifact is illustrated in the seclusion of Prince Prospero and his privileged class in the "extensive and magnificent structure" of a

castellated abbey, whose architecture is a power-structure against the lower classes and against the Red Death as well as an aesthetic structure

of parareligious dimensions which mirrors "the Prince's own eccentric

yet august taste" (254). This is underlined by the undisturbed, self

centered life of pleasure which, through total control of external

circumstances, is to be achieved by that structure. The rituals and

festivities, which are accompanied by various forms of artistic entertain

ment, culminate in a "masked ball of the most unusual magnificence" in

which the intensity of the cultural self-dramatization of human life

reaches its "feverish" climax (257)?but which is recognized in the end, with the appearance of the Red Death, to have only temporarily

disguised the catastrophic climax of self-dissolution which it has precipi tated. In other words, the "energy" of the cultural artifacts in which human life tries to elevate and "eternalize" itself is shown to work in a

way in which it undermines and counteracts the self-affirming purposes for which they were created.5

If the "masque" is one key image of the text, signifying the human, historical dimension of the story's world, the "Red Death" is the other

key image, signifying the transhuman, universal dimension. As the title "The Masque of the Red Death" (italics added) with its linguistic ambivalence between the genitivus subjectivus and the genitivus objec tivus indicates, the two sides are interrelated in a mutually defining and

conditioning way. If we look at the image of the Red Death itself more

closely, we realize that it is an oxymoronic variant of the traditional notion of the plague as the Black Death, linking its destructive meanings with the vitalistic connotations of the color of blood as the life

preserving element, the "liquid organ" of the body responsible for

maintaining the oxygen-supply and the "heat system" of the organism.6

214 COLLEGE LITERATURE

The description at the beginning of the text of the peculiar symptoms of the disease which haunts the world of Poe's story makes it clear that it is no force above, beyond, or in any way separated from life but that it is

life itself which has reached a crisis where it abandons its positive functions within the order of individual organisms and thereby destroys itself:

Blood was its Avatar and its seal?the redness and horror of blood. There

were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the

pores, with dissolution. (254)

Although there is an impression of violence conveyed here, it is not

external violence by which blood is spilt but a violence from within

which, as it were, causes the blood to spill itself?a very unusual form of

illness which can only be explained by assuming a rapid waning away of

the skin, indeed of the whole body. What we have here is thus not the

realistic description of an illness but a figure of the entropie imagination which pervades the story on all levels.

This can also be seen in the spatial design of the text, which is

characterized by an apparently clear-cut opposition between inside and

outside:

There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers,

there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and

security were within. Without was the "Red Death." (254)

But this opposition is undermined from the beginning by the fear of

"sudden impulses of despair or frenzy from within"; by the prison-like

self-immuring of this microsociety; or, on a linguistic level, by the

word-play "within/without," where the opposing worlds are marked off

by the period yet immediately juxtaposed, and where the contrast of the

second syllables is ironically counteracted by the parallelism of the first

syllables. Also, within the self-created insular "paradise" of the prince?which is

at the same time the prison-house of his bizarre imagination?there is

implicit in its very conception the presence of the counterforces of

destruction and negativity which are ostensibly shut out from it. The

extreme irregularity of the castle's architecture and of the way in which

the individual rooms are disposed convey a sense of disorder and

irrationality rather than of order and control. In a parodistic reversal of

the Biblical Act of Creation, the seven differently colored rooms7 which

are arranged from East to West, and in which the masque takes place,

ENTROPIC IMAGINATION 215

are composed in the form of a symbolic teleology of human life which

leads from the color blue to the color black, from light to darkness, from creation to destruction. More precisely, it leads to the seventh chamber which, with its black tapestries and blood-red windows, is an

objective correlative in the spatial composition of the castle of the "Red Death." The unreal or only half-real atmosphere surrounding these rooms is emphasized by the unusual, highly indirect form in which each

of them is lighted by a tripod from a separate corridor "that projected its rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly illumined the room"

(255), suggesting a world of illusions without substance which is in a way reminiscent of the shadow-world of Plato's cave simile.

In the process of the story, of course, the seventh chamber more and more becomes the center of attention, and with it the clock of ebony which symbolizes the structure of temporality underlying and terminating all human activities. In the striking of the hours which dictates the

rhythm of the festivities, time, like space, is made conscious not only as a consitutive category of narrative fiction, but as an existential manifes tation of a principle which consumes itself and which, as such, is built into the events of the masque as their structuring law.

Something similar can be said about the fictional categories of action and character. The conception of life as a masque, and of the world as a

stage, which underlies the scenery of the fete and the climax and turning point of the action to which it leads, is again a traditional motif which views all human behavior in the light of the theatrum mundi?metaphor. But again it is used here also in the more radical sense that human life is

nothing but this masque of history, that there is no "authentic" identity behind the masks the people wear in it. Their life consists only of the fictions they have made of themselves, turning them into "a multitude of dreams" which seem somehow to have merged with the fantastic

nightmarish quality of the rooms in which they dance their "dance of death."8

The masque as a metaphor of human history and culture thus gains an

almost postmodern, Nietzschean meaning in Poe's story, breaking down the binary oppositions of fiction and reality, of mask and identity, into a

self-referential play of cultural signifiers. This is, however, not conceived of in the sense of a "free play" but as a strangely compulsive play, a

theater of escalating, mutually negating forces of opposition which are

finally shown to belong indissolubly together. This is particularly true of the oppositions of creation and destruction, of life and death, as they are

216 COLLEGE LITERATURE

symbolized in the two poles of the "masque" on the one hand and of

the "Red Death" on the other. As for Nietzsche there is no fundamental

difference between life and death, between organic and inorganic forms

of existence?life representing "only another, very infrequent form of

death"9?in Poe's story, too, the masque of the revellers is revealed in

the end as merely another form in which the entropie principle of the

Red Death manifests itself.

But the parallel to Nietzsche ends where the philosopher sees the

transindividual process of creation and destruction as something which, in spite of its inerasable element of negativity, should be affirmed as

potentially meaningful. Poe's view is far more pessimistic here in that he sees all of creation doomed from the beginning by its "predestinated" destruction, which always already overshadows all life-affirming impulses even before they can fully realize themselves. Thus the masque, in which

the cultural self-affirmation of the life-impulse in the story reaches its

maximum intensity, not only implicitly derives its motivating energy from

the very forces of chaos and annihilation that it opposes; but from it

emerges the Red Death as a kind of supermask in which the phantasma

goric world of cultural self-signification is pushed to its extreme, yet in

which it is also dramatically revealed in its fundamental negativity and in

the self-consuming energy of all of its activities. This super- or metamask

emerges out of nowhere, or rather it seems to emanate from the scenery itself and thus to become representative of the principle of all other

masks.

And thus, too, it happened, perhaps, that before the last echoes of the last

chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the

crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked

figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before. (258)

But this new mask, which apparently "concealed the visage" (258) of

the stranger, is shown in the end as concealing nothing at all, because the

Red Death is revealed, in the final confrontation with the other

masqueraders, as consisting of nothing but its mask.

The "Red Death" can thus be seen as a cultural super-sign of the

world of the text which, like the whole structure and the cultural artifact

of the castle, is the product of the prince's imagination, but which has

become an autonomous force that has turned against its human creator.

And in its emptiness which is dramatically revealed at the end, it

epitomizes the horror vacui which, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, has

shaped that imagination from the beginning. It is interesting in this

ENTROPIC IMAGINATION 217

context to note that, for all the contrast between the "characters" of

Prospero and the Red Death?between the aggressive emotionality and

the fast, hectic movements of the prince, and the indifferent, mechanical

movements of the Red Death which, in their inexorable regularity, resemble the swinging pendulum of the clock?there is also an affinity between the two in their dominating behavior and, indeed, in the

stranger's mask itself with its "broad brow . . . besprinkled with the

scarlet horror," which parallels the prince's "brow reddened with rage"

(258). This is underlined by the fact that the prince dies at the very moment when the figure of the Red Death confronts him as an empty mask. The manner of the prince's death?he dies on the instant, as if he

himself has been revealed in this scene of recognition as an empty mask?is significantly not identical with the character and the progress of

the disease as it is described at the beginning of the text.10 Herein, the

world of the story is once more exposed as the world of a cultural

artifact that consumes itself in the same way in which the fictional

categories that are used by Poe to communicate this world?i.e., space,

time, characters, action, and symbolism?consume themselves in the

process of the text. This becomes obvious at the end when, with the

death of the revellers?

the life of the ebony-clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red

Death held illimitable dominion over all. (260)

It is not necessary to share Poe's gloomy pessimism to recognize in the

specific mode in which he organizes his text, in a highly self-reflexive and

carefully structured way, the contours of an entropie imagination which

transcends the traditional imagery of apocalypse and makes this allegori cal story, for all its medieval rhetoric, in many ways appear as a

strangely contemporary text.

NOTES

1 Edgar Allan Poe, "The Masque of the Red Death," The Fall of the

House of Usher and Other Writings. Poems, Tales, Essays and Reviews, ed. with

an introd. by David Galloway, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967) 254-260, 258. 2This etymology is given by Rudolf Clausius (1822-1888) who, after

William Thompson (1824-1907) had discovered the Second Law of Thermody namics, coined the word entropy, to describe its wider implications, in his article

"?ber verschiedene f?r die Anwendung bequeme Formen der Hauptgleichungen der mechanischen W?rmetheorie," Annalen der Physik und Chemie, 125 (1865):

218 COLLEGE LITERATURE

353-400, here 390. While the First Law of Thermodynamics states that all available energy within a closed system remains constant, the Second Law

complements this by the observation that in all transformation processes energy is

irreversibly dissipated, so that disorder continually increases at the expense of

order in the universe. I am indebted in this to Peter Freese, Surviving the

End: Beyond Apocalypse and Entropy in American Literature, (Claremont

McKenna College, Center for Humanistic Studies Monograph Series 1, 1988) 18 ff.

3Freese, op. cit., 19-20.

4The dialectic between "inside" and "outside" in the story and their final

exchangeability are demonstrated by Martin Roth in his sophisticated article "Inside 'The Masque of the Red Death,'

" Substance 13.2 (1984): 50-53.

5There is an affinity between Stanley Fish's concept of "self-consuming

artifact" and the structure of "The Masque of the Red Death," but the point

with Poe's story is that it projects this conception from the sphere of art onto the

real world of human life itself and thus, in its connection with the concept of

entropy in a broad sense, gains an existential meaning.

6See The New Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 2, 1985, 290-291. Blood,

which has "evolved from seawater" (290), is thus not only a metaphorical but a

m?tonymie symbol of the "life-force."

7The number "seven," of course, suggests the seven days of God's

creation of the world, and more generally the path of human life which is

inverted here into a "labyrinthine path" (M. Roth, 51) ending in the black chamber.

8See, for this motif, Sarah Webster Goodwin, "Poe's 'Masque of the Red

Death' and the Dance of Death," in Medievalism in American Culture: Special

Studies, ed. B. Rosenthal et al. (Binghampton, N.Y., 1987) 17-28.

9Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fr?hliche Wissenschaft (Stuttgart: Kr?ner, 1976). 10This is also noticed by M. Roth, op. cit., 52.