"THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF NEEDED" : APOCALYPSE IN GLORIA NAYLOR'S LINDEN HILLS

Virgil's Aeneid, Plato's Hystera, and even certain works of Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Derrida for clues when analyzing various aspects of this highly complex novel. The title of my paper suggests yet another possibility for association as it presupposes certain correspondences between one of Edgar Allan Poe's well-known tales of mystery and imagination, "The Fall of the House of Usher" and Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills. Although the main concern of my paper is to look at Naylor's novel from the perspective of apocalypse, the reason for suggesting a possible analogy between the two works is not necessarily the fact that Poe's eschatological stories are among the most significant ones within the tradition of American apocalyptic literature. I have chosen "The Fall of the House of Usher" for the title of my paper because there are at least two rather uncanny coincidences in the works which, I believe, legitimize my substitution of the name of Linden Hills' antihero, Nedeed, for the protagonist of Poe's story in the title. What most obviously concurs in both works is the cataclysmic end of both Usher and Nedeed and their respective houses. There is, however, another momentum which is identical in the two works. The immediate cause of the apocalyptic destruction at the end of both the novel and the short story is the (re)appearance of a woman from underground where she has been put by the owner of the house. It is not among my interests, though, to engage in a discussion of why Usher, Poe's psychotic insomniac puts his sister, Lady Madeline of Usher, in a tomb alive, or, for that matter, how her rising from the "dead" leads to the fall of Usher and his house. (Why Nedeed exiles his wife, Willa, into the morgue in the basement of his house will be explained later on). Neither do I wish to search for further analogues between the two works.