Edgar Allan Poe is Alive

(And the number two)

Edgar Allan Poe still lives.

Anyone familiar with Poe’s work should already have an understanding of how important the number two was to him.  Consider “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “William Wilson,” and “The Purloined Letter.”  Each of these stories speaks of dichotomy, but a broken dichotomy.  Of course, the crack in the foundation of the setting for Usher indicates the broken mind—using two characters to portray what happens when duality of the mind is fractured.  At the end of William Wilson the narrator stabs his nemesis and in this action suffers the same fate.  The same is true for “The Purloined Letter.”  Norman N. Holland’s piece “Re-Covering “The Purloined Letter”: Reading as a Personal Transaction” in a collection of criticism titled “The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading (The John Hopkins University Press, 1988) is insightful as to the number two in the literature of Poe.           

The human body has two eyes, two ears, two thumbs, two arms, two legs.  The brain has two hemispheres.  The liver has two lobes. 

            The human body is divisible by two.  The heart has four chambers.  We have eight fingers.  Even the number of teeth is divisible by two.

            We have body and mind.  We have mind and soul, love and hate; even our individual desires are only quenched when that desire is met.

            There is life and death.  There is heaven and hell.  We have God and Satan, and between these two lies man—the crack in duality. 

            And in the horror tale dichotomy is answered with the number two: the story and its teller.

James Ward Kirk

06/24/2012