The Kingdom of Inorganization

Abstract

Attraction and Repulsion acquire a remarkable purity as they collaborate on the spectacular narrative scale of Eureka. The emotional and physical debris of the earthly maelstrom—the chaos of terror and wonder, the wreckage of ships and of people—drop from view when Poe focuses his attention on the great theater of space and duration. Neither the titanic nor the infinitesimal realms of being are designed to accommodate the intermediate sphere of human feeling. Atoms are free of the contagions of the flesh; they work out their story of expansion and contraction in an uninfected universe of force: the “ kingdom of inorganization,” Roderick Usher’s childhood friend and visitor will call it, a sentient dimension only briefly visible to human organs.