John Eberhart

26 February 2002

Genre, Period, and Pym

Genre, the different categories of writing, may be determined by the author for his work, or it may be imposed on him by the cultural or institutional expectations of his time -- the Period effects.  Any given work may contain more than one genre, and mixing genres can create desirable literary effects, such as, verisimilitude.  However, if the genres are not skillfully mixed, awkward shifts can degrade the author's intended effect.  This “genre management” is particularly important in the literature of exploration, where the author has an obligation to truth not only to the reader, but also to the men and to the deed he honors in his story.

     Edgar Allan Poe, in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, employs genre shifts that at times enhance meaning, and at times seem to detract from this short novel's literary qualities.  Pym can perplex many modern readers.  While Poe delivers his typically masterful episodes of horrific Gothic madness, the overall novel can be critiqued as a set of chained-together sketches lacking the smooth organic unity of the "typical novel" that has come to be expected. 

     In addition to Poe’s use of many genres in Pym, such as, the Gothic, journal, reference, mythic, psychological, colonial, etc., perhaps the most interesting genre issue is the conflict between Poe's preference for the short story over the more popular and profitable 19th Century novel.  Poe had tried to sell his collected short tales, but was advised that they lacked originality and potential for financial success.  The paying reading public at that time preferred, and gave status to, the novel form, and publishers were better served by the revenue-enhancing three-volume novel format.  These institutional and cultural Period issues, along with Poe's desperate need to earn money, combined to impose a genre on Poe: he needed to write a novel.  What might the frame of such a novel be? 

     Adventure sea narratives were extremely popular in the early 1800s, and recent expeditions, narrations, and scientific theories dealing with the geographic poles had created a public hungry for polar adventure.  Source materials were abundant and rich for Poe, and he borrowed heavily from detailed descriptions of mutinies, hatchet murders, rocks with mysterious glyphs and drawings, ominous polar ice formations, atmospheric light shows, and strangely-colored ocean currents.  All Poe had to do was put it all together.  That “putting together” also reflected Poe’s worldview.  He was an idealist in an age of utilitarianism and spiritual impoverishment; he abhorred the growing power of democracy and feared the abolishment of slavery; the aristocracy was fading; and the poet and author –- the “new aristocracy” -- seemed to be ordained to judge and prescribe for these ills.  All these issues find  expression in Pym, and it is likely that modern readers who lack this background may not have as much sympathy for Poe and Pym as they should.

     Putting such a work together seemed an easy task to Poe, who saw the novel form as a series of thrilling episodes separated by "calm spots" to allow the reader to recover.  Poe was, of course, good at “thrilling episodes,”  and he varied his work to include other less-dramatic genres to achieve what he felt was a saleable novel.  Genre scholars will find a great deal to interest them in Pym: the Gothic novel, journal, sea adventure, myth, reference, psychological, colonial, race, feminist -- and you get the idea.  Reviewing a small sample of those genres can illustrate how they add to, or detract from, the reader's sense of literary value.

     As an example on the downside, Poe's approach to the novel as his superstructure did not work in his favor, at least for many modern readers, who pick up a book (in itself a sign of truth-authority) and expect to find a narrative masterfully crafted to avoid jolts and bumps in the transition from one scene to the next.  It would be asking too much of modern readers to accept Pym as mythic quest, existential angst, or psychological growth.  More likely readers will summarize Pym as an awkward collection of episodes lacking verisimilitude and the writerly art.  Pym’s sequential trapped/released, dead/alive plot turns are just enough on the melodramatic side to detract from the novel’s overall seriousness.  Shifting from heart-rending death scenes to two pages of sea turtle biology (reference genre) surprises readers and makes them wonder what is going on.    So, while the academy and more ardent Poe fans are rewarded by deeper probing into what Poe "might have meant in Pym," the typical reader may chalk this novel up as a wild ride to the poles that ends in basically nothing.

     If Poe gets a B-minus on his novelization skills, he comes back with an A as he excels in the short story genre in Pym.  Poe can, for short stretches, take the willing reader right into a state of intense horror.  His "aesthetics of extremes" combines vivid details, such as the sight and odor of rotting flesh, with believably mad behavior, such as, calling out to dead sailors for help as they drift by.  These episodes of intense emotional impact

--like short stories -- are gems sprinkled throughout Pym.

     Poe uses the reference data genre four times, and these lengthy expositions are more examples of genre gone wrong.  Poe thought pauses in a novel's action were good for the reader, and what better way to pause than to pile on a huge block of seemingly factual data?  Anyone for lessons on stowage or laying to?  This obvious filler poses as authoritative knowledge, and was meant to complement and lend credibility to Poe's more imaginative tall tales.  For most readers, these interludes seem out of place; they work against the overall effect of a natural and well-paced progression of events in a story.  The author’s craft is too obvious and in an unflattering light. 

     Another more effective genre shift in Pym is the brief switch to the journal form on July 3rd while A. Pym was sailing on the Grampus.  While the journal entries do not record extreme hardship or a near-death experience -- where the journal genre excels -- the mere form of the journal lends the Pym narrative a refreshing change of pace and sense of reality.  Journals are symbols of real people doing real things, usually with unvarnished anxiety, fear, and struggles at the extremities.  Embellishments and details drop away, leaving the bare and brutal realities of wind, cold, hunger, and rotting flesh ("only one toe left now" DeLong 158).  For example, DeLong's journal begins with high energy and numerous details of activity and travel records.  At the end, the 140th day, the final journal entry is: "Boyd and Gortz died during night.  Mr. Collins dying" (170).  No other genre could deliver that sense of truth.  Similarly, on Robert F. Scott's last day alive, his journal records: "Last entry.  For God's sake look after our people" (Scott).  The journal form would be hard to improve on in its simplicity and truth: "Elison has eaten his stew by having a spoon tied to the stump of his frozen arm" (Brainard).  This is drama spiked with verisimilitude at its best; the reader wouldn't dare doubt that things are as bad as they are reported.

     Returning to the point: readers will benefit from more sensitivity to genre shift.  Once the rigid requirement for unity and a highly polished narrative is put in abeyance, a greater freedom enables the reader to enjoy Pym’s rapid-fire emotional, psychological, and exploratory thrills. 

     As a last observation on truth and reality, Poe may have inadvertently painted a picture of verisimilitude much to the liking of his modern readers.  That is, what he describes in Pym as the constant illusion of reality, and a brutally uncaring and irrational universe, is precisely at the center of modern man's predicament.

Antarctic Exploration As A Key to Pym

     Several themes reoccur in tales of arctic exploration, and these reflections echo in Pym, making Poe’s novel less fanciful than it might seem on first impression.  In Clint Willis’ introduction to Ice, he notes Byrd’s remarks that “it is surprising, approaching the final enlightenment, how little one really has to know or feel sure about” (8).  This sounds like Pym in nutshell -- a world of illusion lacking logic or purpose.  Francis Spufford remarks that Robert “Scott is not a believer, but he is a romantic, conscious of Nature’s ambiguous force; conscious as well of its blind selecting violence.  ‘I’m obsessed with the view of life as a struggle for existence,’ the purpose you detect in your setbacks may be the fearsome otherness of the natural order, orchestrated for a moment to extinguish you.”  Scott feels there is “the mammoth indifference of the physical universe to his efforts.”  Spufford goes on to quote Debenham: “one cannot live amidst the vast, lonely and yet magnificent scenery of the Antarctic without feeling dwarfed by the scale of everything and in the hands of a Providence or a Power.”  If it’s all Chance, then “there is something behind the Chance” (Spufford 303-304). 

     This reversion to primal reflection represents not only the experiences of Arthur Gordon Pym, but also the characteristics of men at the extremities in exploration literature, an extremity which Edmund Burke says produces terror and the sublime, the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.  When many other insights in the Ice narratives are taken together, like Ponting’s having “peculiar dreams of waterfalls and cataracts (Spufford 306),” and the “sheets and sheets of iridescent clouds”  (Spufford 326), then for the modern reader, Pym begins to seem less like a flight of Poe’s imagination.  Poe deserves more credit for his accurate depiction of the mental as well as the physical experience of Antarctica, particularly the reduction of color to basic black and white, and how that sensory deprivation affects the mind.  It is likely that Poe’s research and respect for verisimilitude is greater than one might think.

The Nature of Exploration Literature

     Apsley-Gerrard's The Worst Journey in the World is not a novel, but as an exploration narrative by a highly-educated author, Pym and The Worst Journey share certain traits.  Most apparently, Apsley-Gerrard enlarges his narrative to novel-like length, far outweighing in size the slim Pym.  This ample space allows the author to develop his characters and reflect on extreme physical and mental struggles.  Poe and Apsley-Gerrard are sometimes alike and sometimes different in their aesthetics to create meaning and rivet the reader's attention.  Both authors picture the innermost workings of the mind anticipating a lurking terror just over the next hill, and learning to respond to the threat of death.  Detailed and artistic descriptions of the landscape and climate add to the sense of actually being with the voyagers, and while Poe uses fictitious Gothic sensationalism effectively, Apsley-Gerrard, in contrast, slowly builds credibility with an understated and utterly convincing sense of tension, stress, isolation, and the ominous.  What place The Worst Journey the exploration genre is its allegiance to the truth about an important event that actually happened, giving the account great authority along with an obligation for the author to honor the truth.  The author and reader in The Worst Journey have a different relationship from that of a novel, and to stretch the truth or indulge in rhetoric would violate that relationship.  There is no gothic horror, or drama for the sake of drama.  In exploration literature the non-monumental things count heavily, like blisters, frostbite, sweat, and skin sticking to metal.  Eating a dog’s head takes on a higher quality of horror than it would in a novel, because we know it really happened.  If exaggeration or rhetoric appears, the spell is broken; the truth must be honored in exploration literature.  If Apsley-Gerrard says the sky had yellow, green, and orange “swinging, swaying curtains,” we would believe it.  If Poe said the same thing, we might tend to think it was an exaggeration for effect.  As Nieder’s interview with Charles Wright illustrates, the creative interviewer may find himself totally at odds with the more sober, understated, and realistic explorer who actually lived the experience.  This is a strength of the interview genre, almost as vivid as the journal genre, delivering informal, spontaneous, and very believable accounts of what actually happened. 

Conclusion

     The literature of exploration is not rhetoric or fiction, but similar to a novel, it can use different genres to deliver different and desirable literary values.  A strong allegiance to the truth must guide the author of exploration literature, or he will soon leave that genre for other fictional genres.  There may be some allowable mis-recollections or minor embellishments, but in the end the deeds and the characters speak for themselves.  All (or most) readers should interpret the same meanings from these true adventures, and the high sense of verisimilitude illustrates that truth can be greater than fiction.  Using or mixing different genres can add value to stories of isolation, fear, courage, triumph, and failure, such as, the journal or memoir from the inside, or novels and biographies from the safe and comfortable outside.  Whichever genre is used in exploration literature, the words are not allowed to stray too far from the deeds that inspired the story.  A longer lasting, more meaningful impression sticks with us from exploration literature; the story goes into that part of our memory reserved for knowledge about the larger human experiences and character we all share.

Works Cited

Brainard, David L.  "Six Came Back."  Ice.  Ed. Clint Willis.  New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1999. 254

Cherry-Gerrard, Apsley.  "The Worst Journey in the World."  Ice.  Ed. Clint Willis.  New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1999.

DeLong, George W.  "The Voyage of the Jeanette."  Ice.  Ed. Clint Willis.  New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1999.

Poe, Edgar Allan.  "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym."  The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and Related Tales.  Ed. J. Gerald Kennedy.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Scott, Robert Falcon. "Scott's Last Expedition: The Journals."  Ice.  Ed. Clint Willis.  New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1999. 117

Willis, Clint.  "Introduction.”  Ice.  Ed. Clint Willis.  New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1999. 8