Mark​​​​ Canada, Ph.D.​

In "The Gold-Bug," a short story that won Poe a minor prize in the early 1840s, three treasure hunters try to follow some enigmatic instructions to find a trove left behind by pirates on Sullivan's Island, off the coast of South Carolina.  When they finally get to the spot, however, there's no treasure to be found.  Upon re-evaluating, however, one of the seekers realizes that another has made a mistake by dropping a line through the wrong eye hole of a skull in a tree.  (It's not as weird as it sounds.  You'll have to read the story to get the full account.)  When they repeat the process and this character drops the line through the other eye hole (the left one), they find the treasure.  In short, the key to solving the mystery and finding the treasure involves a distinction between left and right.

The same can be said of solving the mystery of puzzling Poe.

Before I go any further, I need to caution you that what I am about to propose can sound a little hokey.  I'm a feet-on-the-ground kind of guy, and I need evidence — ideally a lot of it — to believe something.  In my extensive study of Poe, however, I have encountered enough facts, parallels, and provocative clues to believe that there's something here.  I'll let you judge for yourself.

Years ago, during my first semester of graduate school, I took a class in American literature and studied several of Poe's works, including "Ligeia" and "The Fall of the House of Usher."  Only a few months earlier, I had read Carl Sagan's book The Dragons of Eden, which addresses the two hemispheres of the human brain.  Actually, this exposure to the divided brain goes back even further — way back to a seventh-grade science class in which I completed a project on this subject.  It's a little eerie how this subject kept coming back, like an undead character in one of Poe's stories.

In most people, the left side of the brain processes language, and the right side plays a role in processing visuo-spatial information, emotions, and aspects of music.  In the course of my extensive reading of Poe — all of his stories and poems, as well as other works — I have noticed some striking parallels: Poe, of course, used language in writing his stories and poems, but he also integrated a striking amount of imagery into his work; his poetry, furthermore, is highly musical, and both his poetry and his fiction often played on readers' emotions.  

In short, Poe seems to have been tapping into the right brain in multiple ways, significantly more than other writers have done.  Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville occasionally employed imagery, and Walt Whitman was influenced by opera.  Harriet Beecher Stowe certainly sought to arouse an emotional response to slavery.  Poe was different, though.  He filled his poems and tales with imagery, musicality, and emotion all the way to the brim — and then his cup runneth over.  For example, in some of his works, such as "Ligeia" and "Landor's Cottage," he went to extraordinary lengths to paint pictures with his words.  His poetry occasionally was so musical that Ralph Waldo Emerson called him "the jingle man."  (If you need evidence of this last point, just read "Annabel Lee" and "The Bells" aloud.)  As for emotion, well, Poe was explicit about his intention here.  In "The Philosophy of Composition," an essay in which he claimed to expose the process by which he wrote "The Raven," he said, "I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect."  It's not always clear when we should believe Poe, who could be cagey and downright dishonest, but it's obvious that he sought to arouse emotional responses from his readers, as is clear to anyone who has read something as horrifying as "The Cask of Amontillado" or as melancholy as "Annabel Lee."

There's more, though.  The right brain also has been associated with dreams, and Poe's work is shot-through with surreal images and situations.  "The Pit and the Pendulum" may be the most obvious example, but "The Masque of the Red Death" and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym also have surreal dimensions, as does his strange poem "Ulalume."  He even wrote poems with the titles "Dream-Land" and "A Dream within a Dream."  Poe also wrote of deliberately trying to harness the state of hypnagogia, which the brain experiences between the period of wakefulness and sleep, to cultivate material for his creative work.

There's yet another parallel — and this is the one I find most intriguing.  One scholar has proposed an association between the right brain and self-destructive behavior.  If this scholar is right, then Poe's right brain was operating in overdrive.  He not only engaged in this kind of behavior repeatedly, but also wrote explicitly about it in works such as "The Black Cat" and "The Imp of the Perverse," where he referred to "Perverseness" as the "tendency to do wrong for the wrong's sake."

I could cite other examples (as I have in my Audible Original Edgar Allan Poe: Master of Horror), but I'll just say here that I found a lot of evidence that Poe had a particularly active and/or productive right brain and that he tapped it to create his poems and tales.  This theory would help to explain why Poe has had such a widespread and powerful effect on readers.  It's as if Poe recognized a treasure trove in his own head and set out to use what he found there to stir, rattle, and dazzle us in his stories and poems.

The research that has led modern scientists to a robust understanding of the divided human brain has come almost entirely in the past 70 years or so, long after Poe's death, but people knew, even in Poe's day, that the brain was split and that the right cerebral hemisphere controlled the left side of the body and vice versa.  In fact, Poe was fascinated by the pseudoscience of phrenology, which taught that different regions of the brain were responsible for various functions.  Phrenology proved to be wrong about plenty of things, but there is no question that the brain does have a kind of geography to it, at least in some respects.

Did Poe manage to develop a crude understanding of this geography, particularly the separate functions or proclivities of the left and right cerebral hemispheres?

I think he did.

In fact, I think he not only had this knowledge, but also tucked it into one of his stories — there not for all the world to see, but there for a select few of us to puzzle out.  It's worth remembering, as I noted in a previous column, that Poe loved puzzles and even invented detective fiction.  Hiding this key to his literature in one of his stories of detection would be, well, appro-Poe, right?

Although it does not feature C. Auguste Dupin, "The Gold-Bug" is certainly a story of detection.  The mystery to be solved, as I noted above, is the location of a treasure.  The story contains several references to the word right, as well as a reference to 3 o'clock, when the hour-hand of a clock points to the right.  Such details might be insignificant in the work of just about any other writer, but Poe was an inveterate puzzler writing a story built on a puzzle.  The characters decode some instructions to solve one puzzle, but the story is not over: underneath this mystery and solution lie another mystery and solution.  By "looking" with the left eye (controlled by the right side of the brain), we can see the key to Poe's creative method.

Knowing Poe as I do after more than 30 years of studying his life and work, I can easily imagine him devising a puzzle that would lead the most persistent and clever among us to the same treasure that he discovered in his own brain.  OK, Poe, to throw back at you a word you used in the title of another one of your works . . . Eureka!