# Difficulties of Interpretation

The Poe hoax throws off literary interpretation (by Poe’s contemporaries and today’s professor-critic or ProfCrit hanger-on) by sheer centrifugal force. Glancing blows can only strike brief and disconnected sparks from the whirling multi- and intra/extra-dimensional vortex that is a self-contained monster of fiction. It is “grotesque” in our sense that it is freakish in appearance (outlandishly so), and somehow offensive in its insistence on freakishness.

Upon first reading, we

1. are put off

2. become defiant

3. feel that we must respond

4. until we realize that we are arguing with a text, endlessly reiterating the previous steps.

The hoax does not fit the ProfCrit pattern of faux scientific research paper-formatted disseminations of speculations reinforced by footnoted linkages to established faux case law. The laws of logical proof in ProfCrit are much more lax than in Law: let’s call them “poetic” in their application. Poe has fun with this, of course, in Hans Phaall’s legal claim to payment:

I wonder, for my part, you do not perceive at once that the letter — the document — is intrinsically — is astronomically true — and that it carries upon its very face the evidence of its own authenticity.

Reaching the first steps is merely reflexive; reaching the final step is the most difficult, because it requires a certain intellectual “letting go” and openness to reconsideration and reinterpretation of our assumptions about Poe. The assumptions and assertions of dead professors do not need to be our own. They must be tested and re-tested, not blindly carried on because “that’s all we’ve got” in discerning the truth about a real human named Poe who lived at a certain time.