Without Edgar Allan Poe we would not have the mass media landscape we have today, according to a new book by Jonathan Elmer, professor in the Department of English within the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington.

Jonathan Elmer, professor in the Department of English

The book, In Poe’s Wake: Travels in the Graphic and the Atmospheric, explores how Poe has become a household name—as much a brand identity as an author—influencing art, film, animation, and music from the nineteenth century through the present day.

“Poe is very unusual—even unique–in the wide range of different mass media that take an interest in adapting his work, ranging from what we might call highbrow cultural forms, to mass and popular culture,” said Professor Elmer. “When it comes to Poe’s influence, you can see the influence from Manet down to point-and-click video games.”

Elmer’s book is the result of decades of teaching Poe and studying versions of adaptations and treatments of Poe in media other than his own, from the traditional fine arts to today’s streaming entertainment.

“Look at Netflix,” said Elmer. “In 2022 they did a movie, The Pale Blue Eye, a redo of Poe in all the ways that I talk about in the book, and Poe is himself a character in it. The series Wednesday has numerous references to Poe in it. And the recent miniseries The Fall of House of Usher is yet another Poe-inspred Netflix production. These are all examples of the power of the brand.”

And as to the highbrow, explained Elmer, “You see Claude Debussy, the famous French composer, who spent a long time toward the end of his life trying to complete an opera based on Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. He finished a few sections of it but didn’t complete it; it gave him fits.”

The book also cites the example of an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants’ re-telling of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” as a testament to his enduring legacy. “But instead of the narrator going crazy because he hears the heart beating, it’s Mr. Crabs losing his mind because of SpongeBob’s squeaky boots!” noted Elmer. “The episode even includes a Poe quote at the end, when Mr. Crabs says it was ‘the squeaking of the hideous boots!’–a pretty direct citation.”

Explaining the book’s title, “I came up with two terms that I refer to as ‘vernacular aesthetic categories,’ which simply means these are categories with which anybody would describe Poe’s writing,” said Elmer. “You might say a certain movie was really graphic, in that it was extreme or excessive. Or you may say noir movies from the 1940s are atmospheric. If you know anything about Poe’s work, you know that it can be graphic and violent, with stories about people walled up alive, and it can be atmospheric, with winds waving the curtains and people returning from the dead.”

These categories, the graphic and the atmospheric, Elmer argues, are fundamental aesthetic categories for modern mass media.

“I use these terms to make sense of this enormous range of material that points to Poe’s modernity; the way in which Poe anticipates us, and we confirm him,” said Elmer. “It’s fair to say, and also a little hyperbolic to say, that without Poe we would not have today’s mass media landscape. At the very least it’s very hard to describe the mass media landscape we have today,” from genres Poe invented like horror and detective fiction, “without reference to Poe.”

Poe also wrote a number of essays that explained what he was attempting to do with his writing. “He asserted that what matters in art is the effect it has on the audience—it’s not how beautiful the expression of the of the writer is, it’s about the audience,” said Elmer.

That 180-degree turn away from the creator of the work and towards the audience is very much the way we consume culture today. “We’re interested in the effects that these artworks have on us; we’re interested in our own experience,” Elmer explained.

“Poe not only articulates a theory of that, but he produces all these examples of it. In The Telltale Heart, the narrator kills a guy, dismembers him, hides him under the floorboards, but keeps hearing the thumping of what the narrator believes to be the dead man’s heart. In The Cask of Amontillado, the main character lures a man down into catacombs and walls him up alive. In The Pit and the Pendulum, you read about someone tied on a table, and a sharp pendulum swings ever closer to him. Once you’ve read these stories, you never forget them.”

The overarching message that Elmer hopes that readers take from the book is Poe understood the making of art to be a kind of technique rather than an emotional expression. “It’s a gizmo, you put the work together, and with that comes a very experimental mindset,” said Elmer. “That is, you do it this way, see how that works, and then do it that way, and see how that works—and the people who follow him in, say, early film or in animation, they’re also experimenting.

“That experimental approach to literary production, to aesthetic production–Poe showed the way in how to do that.”