Jonathan Elmer’s In Poe’s Wake: Travels in the Graphic and the Atmospheric is imaginative, wide-ranging, allusive, erudite, and eclectic, but also narrowly focused, obscure, and frequently baffling.

If you want to know how Edgar Allan Poe has influenced several generations of graphic artists and prompted writers, filmmakers, and others to evoke atmospherics in their stories, then this may be the book for you. If you want to know why the humanities are becoming increasingly irrelevant to a rising generation of Americans, this is surely the book for you.

Elmer, a professor of English at Indiana University and a longtime Poe scholar, says he set himself the task of “explor[ing] the vastness and variousness of the archive of works inspired by Poe.” For going on two centuries, Poe’s works and his persona have bewitched a wide range of writers, painters, photographers, directors, cinematographers, animators, composers, opera singers, and even videogame designers. He was the remark­ably influe­ntial pro­gen­itor of both gothic horror and detective fiction; Arthur Conan Doyle said a “whole liter­ature” sprang from Poe’s stories of Auguste Dupin.

The most well-known American ­­prize for mystery writers is the “Edgar,” named in Poe’s honor. He sparked widespread interest in science fiction (Jules Verne and H.G. Wells paid tribute). His most famous works have never been out of print, including his world-renowned poem, “The Raven.” Admirers include Charles Baudelaire, Henry James, H.P. Lovecraft, Vladimir Nabokov, and Alfred Hitchcock.

You’ll learn some of this from Elmer, though remarkably, he provides no real biographic framework, not even mentioning that Poe died at 40, in 1849, of widely hazarded but unknown causes. It will help if you come to this book with knowl­edge of Poe’s stories, since Elmer skimps on summaries of the few works to which he continually returns to bolster his thesis about how Poe influenced an olla podrida of future custodians of narrative and its representations.

What you will get is a minutely detailed excursion through matters of image, sensation, impression (especially the sense of violence inherent in the newer meaning of “graphic”), and atmosphere (the mood, mostly of dread and creepy doings) that connect the tales constituting the “Poe brand,” as Elmer calls it, along with a variegated roll call of writers and artists over the centuries. It’s impossible in a short review to convey the depth of the associations, techniques, and images that Elmer covers and just how far-ranging his inquiry is, con­nect­ing, as he does, such disparate types as Édouard Manet, William Gaines, Claude Debussy, Boris Karloff, René Magritte, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Roger Corman, among dozens of others.

It’s unclear whether Elmer is pushing a universalist claim about Poe as the father of — or at least much of — our contemporary artistic environment or has confined himself to demonstrating that many artists have taken flight via Poe’s images, moods, and/or narratives. Would our culture not have been but for Poe? So Elmer might be sug­gesting in his book’s final paragraph, though his text is ­­­free of supporting evidence.

This is not a history or a sociology. Why nearly two centuries of highly regarded writers and artists have fallen for and transformed Poe’s themes remains unstated. Elmer’s mission is to showcase how they have done so. But to get there, you’ll have to wade through much obscurantism and inscrutable prose, often leading to the express conclusion that a thing or relationship is this or that — and also not this or that. Writes Elmer:

“Atmosphere is never not a vague thing; what exactly is flowing is never entirely discernable.”

“Artifice and exaggeration here would not be marks of aesthetic failure, then, but rather signs to the viewer that certain aesthetic failures are built in, inescapable.”

“The concept of the graphic, released from the conventions developed to stabilize the contest between word and image, tends toward its own undoing — toward blackness or illegibility inscribed as a kind of sinkhole within representations seeming to promise precisely the opposite.”

“[S]ound in Poe’s work…is cosmic, pervasive, and estranging…Pythian not Pythagorean, that is, it is not a symbol of unchanging order but a point of access to a metamorphic continuum that extends from human voice to animal, natural, and machinic expression. Form and medium are always determining for the capture of such sonic forces.”

And so on.

The problem with lists of examples is that they mask the extent to which the sin they represent is spread throughout the text. One of Elmer’s recurring themes is the “black box,” an “aesthetic of darkness to which graphic artists are drawn as if to a limit to their own medium’s capacities.” It’s a “confining space from which one cannot escape and in which one cannot see,” a “closure — a narrative or spatial delim­ita­tion that conveys force. Inside…all is existential powerlessness…outside, and if you can handle it, the box brings aesthetic power.” It is “both terrifyingly concrete and wholly abstract…It can be a story, or a frame, or a room, or a page. It can be the grave.”

Even a framed inferno? Consider a well-known image with few rivals in terror, the German airship Hindenburg being consumed by fire as it slowed to dock in New Jersey in 1937. Inside, incin­er­a­tion by conflagration; outside, “terrifyingly concrete and wholly abstract,” in Elmer's phrasing, its power made manifest by the eyewitness reporting of Herbert Morrison, his voice trans­formed by anguish as he bewailed the nightmarish scene: “Oh, the humanity.”

Was this a black box? Seems so. But it wasn’t from Poe. Across the country, students are fleeing English departments, not quite as passengers jumping to escape the flames but to avoid a metaphorically similar fate.

Oh, the humanities.

Jethro K. Lieberman is the author of many books, including a recent mystery, Everything Is Jake, in which the detective may be a distant descendant of M. Dupin, though not intentionally so.

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