Variations on the grotesque: from Poe's "The Black Cat" to Oates's "The White Cat"

Mississippi Quarterly, The, Summer, 2004 by Marita Nadal

IN HER "AFTERWORD" TO Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994), Joyce Carol Oates discusses the concept of the grotesque, pointing out its allure, variety, and pervasiveness in art throughout the centuries. Significantly, she refers to Poe's influence on the literature of the grotesque, "so universal as to be incalculable. Who has not been influenced by Poe?" she remarks. (1) Taking Poe's and Oates's concepts of the grotesque as a point of departure, I intend to analyze "The White Cat" (1987), included in Oates's Haunted, as a postmodern and parodic rewriting of Poe's classic "The Black Cat" (1843), showing that although Oates preserves the domestic atmosphere of Poe's tale and its central motif--the uncanny repetition of the cat--she reverses the characteristics of the original story and thereby produces an unexpected and parodic denouement that undermines "the effect" intended by Poe's tale. In consequence, although the two tales mirror each other in more ways than one, their use of the grotesque is far from similar.

Significantly, both Poe and Oates approach the concept of the grotesque in a vague and comprehensive way. Thus, in his preface to his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839), Poe writes: "The epithets 'Grotesque' and 'Arabesque' will be found to indicate with sufficient precision the prevalent tenor of the tales here published." (2) Using this sentence by way of explanation, he avoids the definition of the terms, remarking only that his stories are "phantasy pieces." As several Poe critics have pointed out, the distinction between both terms as applied to Poe's work is far from clear. For example, Kenneth Silverman notes that although historically these words refer to different types of decoration, the grotesque, "combining plant, animal, and human motifs, [the arabesque] using only flowers and calligraphy," in Poe's time the terms "were often confounded and used synonymously." Silverinan concludes that critic Geoffrey Harpham's definition of the grotesque, a "transcategorical hybrid" mixing the normal and the abnormal, the archaic and the modern, condenses the features of both. (3)

Michael Davitt Bell, in contrast, though reacting against those who distinguish between two types of Poe's tales according to the characteristics implied by these terms, provides a sort of classification based on the clues interspersed in Poe's writing. In Bell's view, the grotesque "implies fanciful humor, burlesque exaggeration, caricature, and, above all, distortion," whereas the arabesque, as connected with the artistic style it describes, points to abstraction and vagueness. As Bell puts it, referring to Poe's indefinite use of the term, "the arabesque attains to 'ideality,' because, quite simply, it doesn't 'mean' anything" (pp. 104-105). Perhaps it is Poe's pragmatic approach to fiction that provides the best clues for the analysis of his work. Let us recall the well-known passage in a letter to Thomas White, the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, in which Poe sums up his formula for successful Gothic writing:

   The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have
   attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in
   nature to Berenice.... I say similar in nature. You ask me in what
   does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the
   grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty
   exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the
   strange and mystical.... To be appreciated you must be read, and
   these are invariably sought after with avidity. (4)

As can be observed, both the grotesque and the arabesque are mixed up in Poe's writing. If, on the one hand, the ludicrous is unambiguosly associated with the grotesque, and if, on the other hand, the burlesque and the horrible are also related to it, the singular and the fearful can be linked to both the grotesque ("strange") and the arabesque ("strange and mystical"). No doubt, Poe was more concerned with "unity of effect" than with clear-cut classifications. In all cases it is excess that sets his formula in motion and pervades his composition practice. As we are going to see, "The Black Cat" epitomizes the sensational and successful effect of Poe's complex technique.

In her "Afterword," Oates wonders about the meaning of the grotesque, noting that "[t]he arts of the grotesque are so various as to resist definition" (p. 303). For her, the grotesque is an all-encompassing category that accommodates a wide variety of artistic works in painting, literature, and film from different periods: from Beowulf to Stephen King and Anne Rice, from Goya to Bacon. However, despite the comprehensiveness of the concept and the possible variations in style, Oates remarks that not all ghost stories belong to the genre of the grotesque; thus, Victorian ghost stories, much of Henry James's Gothic fiction as well as that by Edith Wharton, for instance, are too "nice," "too ladylike," "too genteel to qualify" (p. 304). In Oates's view, the grotesque "always possesses a blunt physicality that no amount of epistemological exegesis can exorcise. One might define it, in fact, as the very antithesis of 'nice'" (p. 304). Although in my opinion Oates's concept of the grotesque is too wide--it includes even Irving's "Rip Van Winkle"--her comments are useful for this analysis. Thus, whereas Poe's tale proves to be full of horror and excess, Oates's appears "genteel" and even "ladylike" in comparison; however, its nature originates in the manipulation of Poe's formula, except that the ingredients are used in different doses, and some extra elements are added to the whole. Hence its subtle but disturbing grotesqueness.