LITR 5535: American
Romanticism
Sample Student Research Project 2006
corey porter!
11.23.06
Who’s Reading Whom:
A Brief Dissection of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
introduction
Sitting down to write this journal has taken a considerable amount of effort, for I’m no stranger to procrastination, nor am I weary of coffee-fueled tirades that may ramble on into incoherency the more exhausted my caffeinated stores become. However, sooner or later the distractions of my life are boiled away and I’m left with only a blank page and blinking cursor. Once these technicolor preoccupations of video games and television are swept aside, my focus narrows and a black on white narrative can truly begin.
I first set out with a vague idea of deconstructing Edgar Allan Poe’s first and only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, into its romantic themes and expressively deceptive discourse, but quickly found multiple literary veins that merited discussion, if not complete immersion. I thought a couple readings of Pym would leave me in well-enough form to tackle its hoax nature and Poe’s romantic contributions to the cannon, but found that the addition of near a dozen journal articles and secondary sources to my reading load left me reading Pym in a more exploratory light. Instead of breaking Pym into only two unequal halves, I found myself following many threads of interest in the novel. With any luck (and no short supply of coffee), I hope to scrutinize Pym’s biblical parallels, its biographical reflection of Poe’s early life, and its ambiguous resolution and confrontation of the sublime, all the while exploring his mastery of gothic imagery and questioning what “Poe called ‘the potent magic of verisimilitude’ (Helms 572).”
It’s important to remember that these separate themes are all interwoven throughout the course of Pym, so writing on one without writing on another is not only difficult, but incomplete.
the men: edgar allan poe/arthur gordon pym
Take a moment and say the two names out loud. It may be a stretch, but it’s worth noting that both names have five syllables, and the rhythm of each suggests the other (223). So begins the journey into the biographic nature of Poe’s Pym. The first of Pym’s major themes tries to reconcile the action onboard the Grampus with Poe’s own life. By applying a romantic overlay to his own life, Poe may have tried to cast himself as a tragic hero. This biographic reading of Pym is mostly found in Richard Kopley’s footnotes in the Penguin Classic edition. It should be noted that the first installments of Pym were originally published in the Southern Literary Messenger, (based in Richmond and for whom Poe was an assistant editor) under the guise of Pym having actually lived the adventure, and under counsel from “several gentleman in Richmond, Va.,” giving a written account. Poe blurs the line of authorship even more by suggesting through Pym that Poe should publish the earlier portion of Pym’s adventures “under the garb of fiction (4).” Pym goes on to say that the public would not accept his story for the fiction Poe portrayed it to be, and under the assumption that his account would be taken for truth, he himself takes up the story where Poe leaves it.
If this confusing tête-à-tête with the reader leaves few brains scrambled, it is has achieved its intended purpose, which is to disassociate Poe from Pym. In doing so, Poe leaves open an avenue for small biographic hints that may go unnoticed upon a first reading:
- Pym’s grandfather is from Edgarton, a thinly-veiled clue that appears five lines into the first chapter of Pym (7).
- According to Pym’s Journal entry, he and the crew aboard the Jane Guy discover the island of Tsalal on January 19, Poe’s birthday (163).
- Pym meets his best friend, Augustus Barnard, at Mr. E Ronald’s academy. It has been suggested by Kenneth Silverman that Augustus represents Poe’s brother, William Henry Leonard Poe (E. Roland is a perfect anagram of “Leonard.”) (224).
- Poe’s older brother Henry was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. Pym holds a similar image when a drunken Augustus finds himself trapped on the capsizing Ariel:
Upon his first attaining any degree of consciousness, he found himself beneath the surface, whirling round and round with inconceivable rapidity, and with a rope wrapped in three or four folds tightly about his neck…During the whole period of his struggles he had not the faintest recollection of the Ariel, nor of any matters in connexion [sic] with the source of his disaster. A vague feeling of terror and despair had taken entire possession of his faculties (15-16).
It’s not a stretch to see Augustus below the surface of the water reflecting an infant Henry in the womb. After his escape, Augustus holds no memories of what took place, much like the newly formed conscious of an infant. Terror and despair could well mean the fits of crying an infant takes to shortly after birth.
- Concerning Pym’s desire to travel: “My father made no direct opposition…” may allude to the fact that Poe’s father abandoned the family, and so he has no “voice.” Rather, “…my grandfather, from whom I expected much, vowed to cut me off with a shilling if I should ever broach the subject to him again (19).” Pym’s grandfather here may represent John Allan, the Richmond businessman who adopted Poe, and from whom Poe takes his middle moniker: Allan refused to cover the gambling debts Poe had accumulated at the University of Virginia, which eventually contributed to his expulsion. Pym’s desire to travel exemplifies Poe’s going to college and/or branching out on his own.
- In what many conceive to be the center of the novel (Chapter 13 of 25), Augustus dies on August 1, the same date Poe’s older brother Henry died of tuberculosis.
The death of Augustus is a central point in the novel for Kopley suggests Pym mirrors itself, and Augustus’ death is the axis at which the two mirrored sides meet (The novel both begins and ends with notes from anonymous editors). This reading bears a more careful examination in a Biblical interpretation of Pym as well. “According to the Providence Tradition, symmetrical language and events frame a significant midpoint involving Jesus coming in judgment, appearing at noon as the ‘Sun of righteousness’ (Malachi 4:2) (231).”
pym and jerusalem
Pym operates on levels beyond the literal. By reading into the Biblical nature of the accounts of Pym, Augustus, and Peters, a reader is able to catch a glimpse of what Poe was thinking of while he was writing. When I first read Pym, I was oblivious to the many hints left in the text, though I’ll be the first to admit that I was not raised in the tradition of Poe’s intended audience. A nineteenth-century reader would be more apt to pick up on the references to Jerusalem than I was, but with a Bible in hand and a nod in the right direction from Kopley, the picture becomes that much clearer:
· The Ariel, the ship Augustus and Pym hijack at the novel’s outset is, according to Isaiah 29:1, another name for an altar in “…the city where David dwelt!” i.e. Jerusalem.
· After Pym, Augustus, Richard Parker and Dirk Peters recapture the Grampus from its mutinous crew, they endure a violent storm by lashing themselves to the deck. The relentless seas finally assuage their violence. “By the mercy of God…we were preserved…and…were cheered by the light of the blessed sun (92).” Kopley suggests this phrase can be read “Blessed Son,” a reference to the Son of God, Jesus. The sun overhead Pym and his companions is their salvation, much as the Son of God is the salvation of mankind (228).
· Pym ties a rope around the hung-over Richard Parker and pushes him into the flooded companion-way to bring him to his senses. “…he appeared much revived and invigorated, and…he expressed himself indebted to me, and said that he felt greatly better from the immersion…(108).” Pym and Parker then administer the same treatment to Peters and Augustus. This act of immersion and reinvigoration is reminiscent of a baptism. At the end of the chapter, Parker corners Pym and confesses the thought that “…one of us should die to preserve the existence of the others (112).” This cannibalistic impulse can be read as a call for the Holy sacrament, or body of Christ.
· It is decided that the four survivors on board the Grampus will cast lots for survival. Mark 15:24 states “And when they had crucified him, they parted his garments, casting lots upon them, what every man should take.” Ironically, Richard Parker draws the short straw and his life becomes forfeit. Peters, Augustus and Pym all “took” from Parker.
· Pym, Peters, Captain Guy and nine other sailors are invited into Too-wit’s tent, where they are served the entrails of a hog while surrounded by natives. Kopley proposes the twelve men represent the twelve tribes of Jerusalem surrounded by the Romans. The entrails equate to the forbidden hog (237).
· “Look upon Zion, the city of our solemnities: thine eyes shall see Jerusalem a quiet habitation, a tabernacle that shall not be taken down; not one of the stakes thereof shall ever be removed, neither shall any of the cords thereof be broken. (Isaiah 33:20).” The stakes and cords which kept Jerusalem safe in the Bible are the undoing of the men of the Jane Guy, who become trapped under the landslides of the natives (187).
· It is no coincidence that Poe’s natives’ king parallels that of the city of Jerusalem: “The name of the natives’ king suggests Solomon, the wise King of Israel who built the temple in Jerusalem.” Kopley notes, “Both ‘Tsalemon,’ and ‘Psalemoun’ feature within them the name ‘Salem,’ a familiar shortened form of the name ‘Jerusalem’ (241).”
At the narrative’s end, Pym and Peters are on the verge of a watery precipice, quickly approaching what appears to be their doom, when “there arose in [their] pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of snow (217).” This shrouded figure has had many names attached to it by different readers as Kopley points out: “death, and as a Lazarus figure conquering death; as goodness and as perversity; as knowledge and as the limits of knowledge; as imagination, the narrative itself, and the white at the bottom of the page; as a Titan, as a divine white shadow (242).”
I believe this figure may represent a divine presence, or a lesser deity of great importance. The natives of Tsalal, by all accounts black (“…the black skin warriors,” [190], “…warriors of the black skin,” [192]), fear or even abhor all things white (“…we could not get them to approach several very harmless objects—such as the schooner’s sails, an egg, an open book, or a pan of flour (166). —all white.), including Pym and his companions: “We were the only living white men upon the island (188).” Soon afterward, they are met with their destruction. This fear of all things white is important to note in my interpretation, because the savages treat these white items ritualistically. A carcass of the white animal discovered by Captain Guy and his crew is met with a most unusual ceremony:
It had now been thrown on shore by the explosion; but why it has occasioned so much concern among the savages was more than we could comprehend. Although they crowded around the carcass at a little distance, none of them seemed willing to approach it closely. By-and-by the men with the stakes drove them in a circle around it, and, no sooner was this arrangement completed, than the whole of the cast assembly rushed into the interior of the island, with loud screams of Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li! (195-196).
The stakes surrounding the white animal are reminiscent of the stakes and cords which are used to trap and kill Captain Guy and his crew in the ravine.
The whiteness the natives detest with such mechanical behavior is, in my mind, directly linked with the white shrouded figure and the narrative’s end. This being may be a demon to the natives of Tsalal, and their ceremonial scorn is in line with religious rituals meant to deter evil sprits, such as the Israelites’ spreading lamb’s blood on their doorways: “For the Lord will pass through to smite the Egyptians; and when he seeth the blood upon the lintel, and on the two side posts, the Lord will pass over the door, and will not suffer the destroyer to come in unto your houses to smite you (Exodus 12:23).” In doing so, the Israelites avoided the angel of death, who was sent to take the firstborn son of all the Egyptians.
“Pym expresses Poe’s interest in the claims for religious authority… (Rudoff 68). When Pym and Peters encounter the shrouded white figure at the cataract, it may be that they are in fact meeting a deity face to face at the edge of the world. Regardless of the true nature of Poe’s “shrouded human figure,” it becomes apparent that he is confronting the sublime and playing with the gothic image of light and dark.
singular sublimity and the gothic tradition
If my introduction was anything, it was meant to foreshadow the way Pym is pared down into singularity from beginning to end; much like my attention must be to complete this paper. Pym begins with a pair of rambunctious young teenagers, Pym and Augustus, taking a drunken pleasure cruise off the coast of Nantucket. They survive the capsizing of the small craft Ariel, and Pym’s taste for adventure in born. Augustus smuggles him onboard the Grampus, a whaling vessel his father is captaining to the South Pacific. The crew of the Grampus becomes mutinous and kills every sailor save Augustus and the hidden Pym. As Pym progresses, more characters are written off (from the crew to a few, then to four, three and finally two…) and the landscape becomes more barren.
… the work presents an increasingly simplified version of the world—a world which is not only literally black and white, but which becomes stripped of all peripheral considerations…The novel becomes a funnel of sorts, gradually narrowing its focus to a point, paralleling Pym’s and Peter’s increasingly defined direction southward… (Rosenzweig 137-138).
Poe trades the industrial ports of Northern America for the vast expanse of the South Atlantic. As our protagonist travels further south aboard the Jane Guy (a slight variation from the diminishing numbers theory), his surroundings become much like the “novel’s obsession with blackness and whiteness (Rudoff 61).”
Pym is clearly a romantic text, though the novel’s end brings to mind decidedly gothic themes. Arthur Gordon Pym, the novel’s protagonist, leaves his home in search of adventure. He travels halfway around the globe on the back of a ship, enduring a number of natural struggles such as storms, swells, and sharks before finding land, and ultimately, meeting with divine presence. His travels have lasting effect on his character, and it must be said that his will to survive trumps that of every other character in the novel save Dirk Peters. Pym displays a “deterioration and disintegration reflected in [his] growing detachment from civilization and his movement into a world not only of isolation but of delusion and unreality… (Rosenzweig 141).” In meeting the “shrouded human figure” and the narrative’s end, Pym undergoes a transcendence of sorts, for the text ends, but the story does not. The note following the narrative goes on to explain that the “few remaining chapters which were to have completed his narrative, and which were retained by him, while the above were in type, fore the purpose of revision, have been irrecoverably lost through the accident by which he perished himself (219).” After his encounter with the figure at the cataract, surely an example of presence of the supernatural, Pym’s adventures continue, albeit off the page. In this sense, Pym the character transcends his own novel, for he exists beyond it. Thomas Carmichael takes a more cynical view of transcendence in Pym: “…Pym’s narrative is the product of a dispersed authority that parallels its own mocking portrait of the desire to achieve a transcendent understanding.”
The gothic in Pym appears early in the novel:
My sensations were those of extreme horror and dismay. In vain I attempted to reason on the probable cause of my being thus entombed. I could summon up no connected chain of reflection, and, sinking on the floor, gave way, unresistingly, to the most gloomy imagining, in which the dreadful deaths of thirst, famine, suffocation, and premature interment, crowded upon me as the prominent disasters to be encountered (32).
Pym is trapped in the hold of the Grampus and imagines it to be his tomb. This idea of premature burial is one Poe revisits again in his writing career (“Ligeia,” 1838; “The Premature Burial,” 1844; “The Cask of Amontillado,” 1846). Reason fails Pym in this state, and he imagines his own grisly death scenes. These images may be a reflection of the supernatural; it seeps through the seams in Pym’s mind that logic and reason fail to mend.
Although the hold is similar to a tomb, the gothic imagery in Pym is most evident in the final chapters of the narrative, where the crew Jane Guy meets the natives of Tsalal. On his January 19th entry, Pym describes the savages as “…muscular and brawny;” their “…complexion [sic] a jet black… (163).” Pym goes on to describe the natives’ clothing, “…skins of an unknown black animal… (163),” the wildlife, “…a large black bird…(193),” the land of Tsalal, “…a vast pit of black granite, (198),” the marl of the earth, “The marl was also black; indeed, we noticed no light-coloured substances of any kind upon the island (207),” and even the teeth of the savages, “These were black (216).” Poe has placed an entirely black society in the midst of the white Antarctic, and to great effect. The natives of Tsalal react with either great trepidation or extreme violence when they encounter anything white. Nu-Nu, the captive of Pym and Peters, appears to die as the three head still further south into whiteness:
The gray vapour had now arisen many more degrees above the horizon, and was gradually losing its grayness of tint. The heat of the water was extreme, even unpleasant to the touch, and its milky hue was more evident that ever. …A fine white powder, resembling ashes—but certainly not such—fell over the canoe and over a large surface of the water…Hereupon Nu-Nu stirred in the bottom of the boat; but, upon touching him, we found his spirit departed. (216-217).
Nu-Nu’s death occurs just prior to the shrouded figure appearing before Peters and Pym, perhaps a clue from Poe that this native of Tsalal has met his creator/destroyer. Regardless of the nature of the figure above the cataract, must be conceded that the supernatural is in play, and as I hope to prove, in fact, sublime.
As Poe reduces the narrative to more and more basic elements, it may be considered that he is leading up to a final revelation. If this pattern holds true, Pym must read from beginning to end as “many to one.” The sublime, then, is the final amalgamation of terror and awe Pym and Peters encounter at the edge of the cataract. Poe comes to “a realization of or confrontation with the limits of language, [and] its inability to fully articulate our thoughts or to fully explain our experiences (Miecznikowski 55).” Poe’s placement of the shrouded white figure at the narrative’s end has a dual nature; if the figure is indeed a sort of deity, the two characters are presented face to face with what the whole of the nation of Tsalal feared, “Just as the sublime confronts the subject with the unpresentable…,” and according to the note, Pym and Peters overcome (Nadal 374).” This scenario begs the question: if the natives, such as Nu-Nu, were so ceremonially horrified of this white figure, why or how did Pym and Peters walk away unscathed? The figure must be, ultimately, benevolent in order for Pym and Peters to survive. I would like to postulate that Poe attempts to capture the sublime by ending the narrative at the cataract with Pym and Peters in the presence of this larger than life figure. The sublime is so terrifyingly awe-inspiring that words are unable to express it; therefore the narrative must come to a close. “Pym’s adventure is not incomplete; his narration is. Such absence may indeed be Poe’s point (Gitelman 360). By following with a note, however, Poe is able to distinguish the sublime from the end of the novel. This supposes that while one is able to confront the sublime, one might not be able to recount “…that final effect of indeterminacy and wonder (Zanger 283).”
conclusion
Looking back on my proposal, this journal has drifted far from its original aim: to decipher the hoax nature of Pym. While I believe the work is an exemplary definition of the romantic, I find myself struggling with the notion of Poe trying to “fool” his readers into believing Pym is a truthful account of one man’s journey to the bottom of the earth. The narrative contains a wide variety of discrepancies, some of which stem from the original travel accounts Poe unabashedly lifted from (such as dates and degrees on the globe), others for which full credit must be given to Poe (such as Augustus’ recounting the mutiny to Pym and the promise of more albatross/penguin nesting “That Pym’s account does not later ‘speak of the penguin and albatross’ intensifies the anticlimactic elements of the novel [Gitelman 355]”). Although Pym is his first novel, I find it difficult to believe Poe would allow room for such glaring errors when trying to pull the wool over the public’s eyes. Rather, I would like to believe that his Pym is a lampoon of popular novels of the time, specifically travel literature. “What mattered most to an artist like Poe was the effect such disputes had on a reader’s…mind. (Fafklik 272).” Poe is simply trying to show his readers that the travel literature they are so familiar with in nothing more than formulaic hackneyed writing.
The very status of Pym as a novel is enforced throughout by Poe’s parodic representation of the discursive (distinctly non-novelistic) conventions of exploration accounts and the generic constraints evidently experienced by explorers eager to present ‘the facts’ of geographic discovery in a believable manner (Gitelman 350).
What have brought me further from my initial intent, I think, are my sources. Only after reading the multiple takes on Pym and rereading the novel was I able to understand the work as more than an attempt to mislead its readers; on the contrary, I believe it is one of Poe’s most complex and provocative works. Not only does he provide an enormous amount of material to work with, his seemingly ambiguous ending acts as sort of Rosetta stone for multiple interpretations. “Poe’s intention, it seems clear, was to create precisely the enigmatic narrative that he left for us (Zanger 279).”
As for my sources, the journal articles I read helped me form an opinion on Pym, which before this semester I had just considered to be a marvelous read. The secondary sources really didn’t fit into my game plan, other than offering examples of where Poe may have lifted some of his work. All in all, I think I could have done without them (although they do flesh out my bibliography). Honestly, the source I used the least (for a list of Poe’s works and their publishing dates) may be the most controversial, and I’d like to take a swing at defending it. Wikipedia, the encyclopedic wiki (user-edited website), is a vital resource for knowledge on highly specific subjects. It is non-academic, privately-funded website that wouldn’t pass muster on any high-school works cited page; however, I think it can be useful. While it is true that nearly anybody can edit the information on a wiki, only rarely are they the subject of vandalism. More often than not, experts on any given subject are the proponents of posting information on that subject (though it doesn’t hurt to double-check). In this case, my use of Wikipedia is harmless.
All in all, I think the journal was the correct format for me to present this gross of information in. It felt like amore organic relation of my thoughts than a paper, and it evolved over the course of conception to execution.
bibliography
Carmichael, Thomas. “A Postmodern Genealogy: John Barth's Sabbatical and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.” University of Toronto Quarterly: A Canadian Journal of the Humanities 60.3 (1991): 389-401.
Faflik, David. “South of the 'Border,' or Poe's Pym: A Case Study in Region, Race, and American Literary History.” Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures 57.2 (2004): 265-288.
Helms, Randel. “Another Source for Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym.” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 41.4 (1970): 572-575.
Miecznikowski, Cynthia. “End(ings) and Mean(ing)s in Pym and Eureka.” Studies in Short Fiction 27.1 (1990): 55-64.
Nadal, Marita. “Beyond the Gothic Sublime: Poe's Pym or the Journey of Equivocal (E)motions.” Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures 53.3 (2000): 373-388.
Rosenzweig, Paul. “'Dust within the Rock': The Phantasm of Meaning in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.” Studies in the Novel 14.2 (1982): 137-151.
Rudoff, Shaindy. “Written in Stone: Slavery and Authority in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” American Transcendental Quarterly 14.1: (2000) 61-82.
Zanger, Jules. “Poe's Endless Voyage: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 22.3 (1986): 276-283.
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