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| The Eye of Time by Salvador Dalí |
A solitary eye rolls in and out of Poe's short stories. Not eyes, mind you, because this one travels solo. It does so discreetly and leaves an almost imperceptible but haunting trail in its wake.
The Black Cat loses one eye during a sadistic act. The murdered master in The Tell-Tale Heart dies because 'one of his eyes' ('a pale blue eye,' 'the vulture eye,' 'his Evil Eye') terrifies his servant. Roderick Usher lives in a dilapidated mansion with 'vacant eye-like windows' and has 'an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison.
The image of a singular eye does more than imbue each story with a surrealist tone. In its plural condition, eyes belong behind one's face – safely tucked in their appropriate pockets. An eye invoked on its own feels disembodied, a sphere of squishy tissue freed from its facial constraints. It has agency and an active gaze, like the Evil Eyes iconic to so many cultures.
I remember too, that Mary Shelley uses the imagery of the singular eye to describe the breathtaking moment when the creature comes alive, when Victor Frankenstein says, 'I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open.' The idea that an eye on its own appears disembodied, thus, could not be more appropriate than a tale about a humanoid built from disparate body parts!
So there you have it: Edgar Allen Poe, master of eyeball-horror.
Now for a truly-horrific and truly-true tale one can't do any better than See No Evil, Skip Hollandsworth's account of the Texan serial-killer with a lifelong fascination with eyes.
That's exactly what I was thinking about! Those eyes are just pestering me!)
ReplyDeleteIn the THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF M. VALDEMAR the author also concentrated on the right eye of the dying man - on only one eye!
And Hawthorn seems to be obsessed with hands: the birthmark in the form of a hand, representing life; the poisonous mark of the Rappacini's daughter's hand where she touched her not-yet-lover when trying to stop him from touching the flowers and thus infecting him too... And even the butterfly in THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL seems to be "working" only from one's hand, and it feels the person's personality through the hand.
Those hands fascinate me even more than eyes as they too seem to be connected with the soul somehow.
For Dracula I nearly wrote about the eyes because, when Jonathan Harker first describes the count, he never mentions the eyes. Rather, he describes the nose, the hands, even the eyebrows. That the eyes are the window to the soul would have likely been woven is as well. That is one of the essays I knew I couldn't condense into 320 words so I didn't even try. It killed me, however, when I then noted, as you have in your post, how the idea of the eye(s) continues to come up.
ReplyDeleteThat's interesting and something I had never considered regarding Dracula. I'll have to go back and read those passages when they first meet.
ReplyDeleteWhat always struck me from the description given by Harker is how much Dracula fits into the anti-Semitic stereotype of 'Jewishness.' He often describes Dracula's aquiline, pointy nose and the foreigness of his appearance. I don't recall Harker's omission of the eyes in his first description but I remember that later on, he describes the Count's eyes as glowing red, a description that pins him as demonic and animalistic, and was not an uncommon characteristic attributed to 'Jews' in the nineteenth century.
Love the Dali eye and now thinking about other eyes: Emerson's all-seeing floating eye; various eyes (Ra, Horus, Atum, Hathor) in Egyptian mythology, some very aggressive.
ReplyDeleteThat just made me think of the floating eye atop the pyramid on the American dollar!
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