At the LA Times Book Festival, held annually at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, I felt bombarded by clever book-themed merchandise, like quirky notebooks and stylish pens. Yet, when I entered the most crowded tent, a light beamed down upon Edgar Allan Poe. Or, at least, the unmistakable lines that sketched his portrait on an otherwise plain white mug. By Jove, I’ve done it, I rejoiced. I discovered my keepsake from the festival. I waded waist deep through the children surrounding the picture books, and clutched my prized possession. The Poe mug was mine!
Standing four inches tall and three and a half in diameter with a handle big enough for a couple fingers, the mug issues an understated charm with its off-white glaze inside and out. A few thin black lines on the front delineate Edgar Allan Poe’s portrait. Due to their lack of detail, Poe’s recognizableness taunts the viewer into acknowledging his iconic fame. He stares out, in defiance of his half-glimpsed silhouette, in chummy and dejected sophistication. Underneath Poe’s portrait, in a slight U-shape, the mug commands “Just Say Poe,” each word is capitalized. On the mug’s back, in much smaller script we find, “SELTZER GOODS” and “USA” with a dot separating the two concepts. The capitalization of all letters in “Seltzer Goods” and “USA” niftily enlarges its hushed placement on the rear end. “Made in China” is indicated on the bottom challenging the implied American provenance of the Seltzer Goods trophy. Poe fans and casual readers are probably the main targeted audience for the mug, punning on the double meaning of mug as in “large cup” but also “human visage” and the informal “mug shot.” The additional pun “Just Say Poe” plays with the famous slogan, “just say no,” popularized in the 1980s and 1990s during the War on Drugs in America. The ambition of this campaign was to decrease drug use by directing teenagers offered drugs to “just say no.” Yet, the anti-drug motto pairs uneasily with Edgar Allan Poe’s face, given that the gothic master was notorious for generous drug references in his short stories and allegedly a drug user himself. Drugs intoxicate central characters in “The Cask of Amontillado,” “Ligeia,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” for example. In “Ligeia,” Poe’s narrator confesses his nasty addiction when celebrating Ligeia, “In beauty of face no maiden ever equalled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream.”[1] Quite explicitly, Poe here eulogizes opium by associating the narcotic with “radiance” and “beauty.” Yet, this connotation discretely shifts, when Poe later divulges, “In the excitement of my opium dreams (for I was habitually fettered in the shackles of the drug) I would call aloud upon her name.”[2] Connecting opium with “shackles,” Poe implicitly calls up also the political and ethical dilemmas of slavery alongside the narrator’s distinctly negative “excitement.” Most importantly, Poe carefully ties opium to the narrator’s love of Ligeia, as both references bubble up in description of his lover; they are positive when Ligeia is alive and flip into negative after Ligeia’s death. Does Poe imply here that the effect of the narcotic relies on the user’s emotional state? Or is he rather indicating that Ligeia, whose name subtly incorporates the verb “to lie,” might be herself little more than an addict’s phantasmagoric illusion? Critics and biographers have often accused Poe of various drug addictions, although no actual evidence backs these claims. Still, also our mug returns to Poe’s familiar drug association but in an ironic and humorous way. Here it becomes clear that the pun “Just Say Poe” can only be fully deciphered if the audience possesses a general pre-knowledge about Poe’s work and lingering drug connection
At the same time, Seltzer Goods clearly mass-produced the Poe mug with the goal of financial profit. In fact, Seltzer Goods replicates the clever slogan “Just Say Poe on an impressive array of Poe paraphernalia on their website, including buttons. After all , the mug belongs to a set of everyday objects elevated by their explicite association with Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, and Emily Dickinson. All of these famous author designs include puns usually with the respective writer’s last names: the Emily Dickinson’s mug declares,“Read like the Dickinson,” the Oscar Wilde mug, “Wilde about Books,” and the Jane Austen mug ,“Austen-tacious.”. The Poe mug alone, then, includes references to the author’s rumored life and habits. That is, Seltzer Goods specializes on easily recognizable, canonized writers from the nineteenth century. Usually, you do not need to be a literary scholar to conjure some knowledge about this canon of writers. The mugs clearly target a mass-audience and casual readers that wish to up their cleverness points by slurping coffee from a cup embossed with a famous author.
In addition to the drug reference, the Poe mug—purposefully or not—allude also to Poe’s writing through the radical whiteness of its glaze. Remember the complcated end of Poe’s only novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Here, Poe conjures not only “white ashy material,” a “white curtain,” and “pallidly white birds,” but also a large human figure with skin “of the perfect whiteness of the snow”[3]. Pym’s conclusion and its unbearable, threatening whiteness overtakes the narrative and ends the novel ambiguously, leaving it to the reader to find meaning or accpeting its absence. At the same time, the obsessive repetition of whiteness prefigures the actual whiteness of the book’s last page, which may point to a meta-fictional pun on the material conditions of writing and print culture. My Poe mug, stained from too many strong teas, also reminds me of the printed worlds of literature and the dedication needed for both their construction but also their sophisticated analysis. Critics often have carelessly and brutally exposed Poe as an outsider and mad genius, but his commitment to art and the world of the mind radiate throughout his work. I drink to this dark and delightful artistry and enthusiasm whenever I lift my mug and “Just Say Poe.”