have i told this story yet? idk but itβs good. The Orangutan Story:
my american lit professor went to this poe conference. like to be clear this is a man who has a doctorate in being a book nerd. he reads moby dick to his four-year-old son. and poe is one of the cornerstones of american literature, right, so this should be right up his alley?
wrong. apparently poe scholars are like, advanced. there is a branch of edgar allen poe scholarship that specifically looks for coded messages based on the number of words per line and letters per word poe uses. my professor, who has a phd in american literature, realizes he is totally out of his depth. but he already committed his day to this so he thinks fuck it! and goes to a panel on racism in poeβs works, because thatβs relevant to his interests.
background info: edgar allen poe was a broke white alcoholic from virginia who wrote horror in the first half of the 19th century. rule 1 of Horror Academia is that horror reflects the cultural anxieties of its time (see: my other professorβs sermon abt how zombie stories are popular when people are scared of immigrants, or that purge movie that was literally abt the election). since poeβs shit is a product of 1800s white southern culture, you can safely assume itβs at least a little about race. but the racial subtext is very open to interpretation, and scholars believe all kinds of different things about what poe says about race (if he says anything), and the poe stans get extremely tense about it.
so my professor sits down to watch this panel and within like five minutes a bunch of crusty academics get super heated about poeβs theoretical racism. because itβs academia, though, this is limited to poorly concealed passive aggression and forceful tones of inside voice. one professor is like βthis isnβt even about race!β and another professor is like βthis proves heβs a racist!β people are interrupting each other. tensions are rising. a panelist starts saying that poe is like writing a critique of how racist society was, and the racist stuff is there to prove that racism is stupid, and that on a metaphorical level the racist philosophy always losesβ
then my professor, perhaps in a bid to prove that he too is a smart literature person, loudly calls: βBUT WHAT ABOUT THE ORANGUTAN?β
some more background: in poeβs well-known short story βthe murder in the rue morgue,β two single ladiesβa lovely old woman and her lovely daughter who takes care of her, aka super vulnerable and respectable peopleβare violently killed. the murderer turns out to be not a person, but an orangutan brought back by a sailor who went to like burma or something. and itβs pretty goddamn racially coded, like they reeeeally focus on all this stuff about coarse hairs and big hands and superhuman strength and chattering that sounds like people talking but isnβt actually. if thatβs intentional, then heβs literally written an analogy about how black people are a threat to vulnerable white women, which is classic white supremacist shit. BUT if he really only meant for it to be an orangutan, then itβs a whole other metaphor about how colonialism pillages other countries and brings their wealth back to europe and thatβs REALLY gonna bite them in the ass one day. klansman or komrade? it all hangs on this.
much later, when my professor told this story to a poe nerd friend, the guy said the orangutan thing was a one of the biggest landmines in their field. he said it was a reliable discussion ruiner that had started so many shouting matches that some conferences had an actual ban on bringing it up.
so the place goes dead fucking silent as every giant ass poe stan in the room is immediately thrust into a series of war flashbacks: the orangutan argument, violently carried out over seminar tables, in literary journals, at graduate student house parties, the spittle flying, the wine and coffee spilled, the friendships tornβthe red faces and bulging veinsβcurses thrown and teaching posts abandonedβpanels just like this one fallen into chaosβdistant sirens, skies falling, the dog-eared norton critical editions slicing through the air like sabresβthe textual support! o, the quotes! they gaze at this madman in numb disbelief, but he could not have known. nay, he was a literary theorist, a 17th-century man, only a visitor to their haunted land. he had never heard the whistle of the mortars overhead. he had never felt the cold earth under his cheek as he prayed for godβs deliverance. and yet he would have broken their fragile peace and brought them all back into the trenches.
my professor sits there for a second, still totally clueless. the panel moderator suddenly stands up in his tweed jacket and yells, with the raw panic of a once-broken man:
WE! DO NOT! TALK ABOUT! THE ORANGUTAN!
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