Titles: Silence—A Fable and Shadow—A Parable
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Culture: American
Type: Poetic Short Stories
Date Finished: 26th July 2010
This pair of short stories, Silence—A Fable and Shadow—A Parable, by Edgar Allan Poe have a similar style and both contain allusions to religion, death and classical times, are dream-like in biblical proportions. Shadow is a story narrated by a man who has “long since gone [his] way into the region of shadows” i.e. died. He calls himself the Greek One who lived in a time of pestilence and terror, where the heavens influenced the meditations and creations of men. He speaks of sitting in an antique hall in the city of Ptolemais with seven men drinking wine in a heavy atmosphere of Evil, laughing hysterically and taking merriment in those who were about to die. A “shadow neither of man nor God” came upon the room and when asked by Oinos, the Greek One, it spoke and told him he was “SHADOW”, to which they cowered and realised a multitude of voices spoke, the “familiar accents of many thousand departed friends”. Silence is a fable spoken by a demon about a place in Libya along the river Zaire, which has no quiet nor silence. The “river [has] a saffron and sickly hue” and on either side is a pale desert with fields of gigantic, sighing water lilies. The demon speaks of a moment were it rained blood, the moon arose with a crimson mist, and a huge grey rock by the side of the river caught his eye, which had upon characters which said “DESOLATION”, and had an old, stately god-like Roman man standing upon its summit, trembling in solitude. A storm struck the place of the demon, and he continued to observe the actions of the man. The demon cursed his surroundings, and the characters on the rock changed to spell “SILENCE”, and the Roman man fled. The listener of the Demon’s tale recounts how wonderful it was to hear, and the Demon next to him laughed, and cursed him because he did not laugh, and a lynx lay down at the Demon’s feet “and looked at him steadily in the face.”
Silence
I think the antiquity of this fable to be beautiful and pleasing to read, because it is of a rare quality that touches heavily upon mysticism and blind, confident exploration. Poe travels into a realm of his imagination that contains mystic conceptions and figures that can only be understood or felt with the spiritual eye; the third eye chakra that dissects the veil hiding the truth. That the secondary character of the Demon tells the fable, for example, rather than the first-person narrator, signifies that the eyes through which we examine the fable are mystic, demonic and imaginative eyes that are unlike our own, yet the Demon simply represents an aspect of the human that is not built upon and well used in society, the mystic imagination. The Demon sees many exaggerated happenings, like the gigantic lilies, the blood red river, the bleeding son, the towering rock, that, through normal, human eyes would be seen as a normal desert with the odd water lily here and there, a brilliant sunset strange, but usual rock formations and a river reflecting the rays of the sun, giving it a wonderful hue. In this way, the mysticism hidden from humanity is what is explored here; the mystical point-of-view of nature, of life, with strong implications of the bible.
Shadow
The parable of the shadow, to me, is Poe’s poetic making of the point that crimes of murder against humanity effect every earthly being, not just those who are dead, and that the karmic retribution of ignoring or causing mass death would posses all impure (the excessive consumption of wine) people with absolute fear and regret. I find it fascinating that Poe made such philosophical challenges in very poetic ways and because of this Poe is even more admirable to me. For example, as the eight men, seemingly Greek war generals or intellectuals, are maniacally revelling in such an atmosphere of “Evil”, a huge shadow looms over the brass door, which is locking them in (symbolic of being trapped by their own creations/doings, and a consequence is always present), and says to them ‘I am SHADOW, and my dwelling is near to the catacombs (tomb) of Ptolemais, and hard by those dim plains of Helusion (paradise) which border upon the foul Charonian (Charonte is the boat man of hell) canal.’ The men respond with a heightened sense of fear, and recognise the voice is of thousands of departed friends. Obviously, being faced with a speaking shadow is what possessed these men with fear, but it is more the fact of their realisation that the shadow was a collection of the souls of the dead, or their karmic past, that fills them such terror, signifying that the greatest fear of the soul is that of its karmic past, the consequences of their deeds, in my opinion.