The Jingle Man: Trauma and the Aesthetic

Abstract

There are two features of this little story that interest me here. The first concerns the way the tag is created: Emerson has been on a "far search for meaning, "he has had to rummage around in his memory, and what he comes back with is essentially an onomatopoeia, less a meaning-memory than a sound-memory. Because Poe wrote such jingly poems, it is implied, the very memory of him comes back as itself jingly. Poe sticks in the memory as one who trades more in musical effects than insignificant poetic meaning. These musical effects are, moreover, regularly deprecated, defended against. We need only extrapolate from Emerson's phrase and think of the irritating insistence of advertising jingles to grasp something essential about how Poe's reputation has been compromised by his jingliness. Harold Bloom has this jingling insistence in mind when he writes that he can think of no other canonical American writer "at once so inevitable and so dubious"(3). His inevitability, I would say, is precisely what makes him dubious, and this is because his works do not so much "endure," as they "return." Poe's place, we might then say, is less in tradition than in memory, and what keeps coming up out of memory are effects, affects, certain rhythms, a style of musical artifice. F. O. Matthiessen's term for this ensemble of stylistic traits-again, a term of disapprobation-was "factitiousness"(xii).