Poe's "Kingdom of Inorganization"

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

Many thanks to the 19 hardy individuals who came to the library on March 24th, a chilly evening, for our meeting on Poe's short story "The Fall of the House of Usher."  Opinions varied as to the import of the story.

One participant thought the scene in which Roderick Usher and the narrator pore over a litany of mystical texts -- e.g., Vervet et Chartreuse of Gresset, the Belphegor of Machiavelli, the Heaven and Hell of Swedenborg -- was evidence of Poe's interest in unearthing lost philosophical traditions.  Another participant maintained that Poe only wanted to spin a good scary yarn.

In the paragraph after the poem "The Haunted Palace" (which contains the lines "But evil things, in robes of sorrow/ Assailed the monarch's high estate), and preceding the one containing the litany of texts ("Our books -- the books which, for years, had formed no small portion of the mental existence of the invalid"), Poe interposes a paragraph about "an opinion of Usher's" concerning "the sentience of all vegetable things" (emphasis added).

The narrator says: "But, in his [Roderick's] disordered fancy, the idea has assumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganization."  (emphasis added, again). He goes on to describe Roderick's belief that this phenomenon, the "sentience of all vegetable things" explained the arrangement of the stones of his house and the fungi that had grown over them, the decayed trees around the house, and the murk within the tarn.

Perhaps Poe is offering a metaphor of the growth and decay of all things.  He may also offer it as a mirror of the decay of Roderick's psyche, and his "fall" into irrationality. The monarch of "The Haunted Palace" is reason itself.