The Critical History of Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

A Dialogue with Unreason

Ronald C. Harvey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134828739
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism

The Critical History of Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative ofArthur Gordon Pym: A Dialogue with Unreason traces the complex, scattered criticism of Poe's most anomalous work, as it has steadily grown in prominence to a central position in the study of Poe and American literature. The winding route the criticism of Pym has charted, as convoluted as the narrative itself, has been a history of disagreement at almost every level at which critics and scholars read texts--including the nature and genre of the work, the seriousness or levity of the author's intent, and its stature as a work of genius, hackwork, or something in between. The unique set of thematic and narrative problems the work poses has eluded every hermeneutic structure brought against it so far, consistently undermining the very reading strategies it seems to invite.
The only comprehensive critical history and bibliography of Pym, this study fills a large hole Poe scholars have long felt, as it analyzes the ways in which critics and critical camps have attempted to confront, rationalize, contain, or evade its novel and disturbing features. In the process, the criticism is correlated with the popular reception and the international response. Because literary history has entangled no author with his work more than Poe, ultimately this book is as much a study of Poe as of Pym. At every point, therefore, this study embeds the critical response to Pym in the history of Poe studies in general, as well as in the larger context of American literary theory and history. Includes bibliography and index.

CHAPTER ONE

“An Impudent and Ingenious Fiction”: Introduction

1
AIMS

In much of his work Michel Foucault reveals a fascination for artists of a certain kind: Holdërlin, Nietzsche, Raymond Roussel and others. In their art they have kept alive throughout the reign of reason in the Western world what, as he says, was restored to science only in the twentieth century by Freud, “the possibility of a dialogue with unreason” (Madness 198). Theirs is a language which, as he said of Roussel’s, “comes to us from the depths of a night that is perfectly clear and impossible to dominate” (qtd. in Racevski 49). If one were to choose an American book which comes to us from such an ulterior region, and has itself proven more than any other to be “impossible to dominate,” that work could well be Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

In attempting my own interpretation of Poe’s only complete book-length narrative, I encountered a remarkable critical history, one which has changed dramatically with the generations, and one which can be characterized as dissensus on nearly every level at which critics and scholars read texts. Satisfying answers to questions of the work’s meaning and its merit seem perpetually to recede ahead of us, as the most basic questions about the text and its composition remain open: the genre of the work, the seriousness of Poe’s intent, its stature as a work of genius, hackwork, or something in between, and even its state of completion. Yet it is the question of meaning implicit in the text, regarded, if one is acknowledged at all, as variously apocalyptic, nihilistic, mysterious, confused, radical, or nonsensical, to name a few, that provides the most interesting and fruitful set of issues. Poe scholars and literary historians who turn to Pym in the context of contemporary theory, as they are doing in ever increasing numbers, encounter not a unified, progressive history of criticism, but a uniquely complex and rich body of commentary, varying widely in quality, emphasis and estimation. It seemed, therefore, that as the attention is making Pym, for the moment, one of the most important texts in the Poe canon and in nineteenth-century literature, a comprehensive history of the response to the work to the present would prove useful. At least it would illuminate the development of the response through past and current critical and scholarly contexts; hopefully, in the end it will illuminate Pym itself.

In this study, then, I bring to bear every published discussion of Pym I could locate, from its initial publication in July, 1838, onward, toward the an examination and analysis of how the book has been received. I bring into relation the critical issues, priorities, and conclusions of successive generations, analyzing diachronically the evolutions as they have unfolded over a century and a half; but I will also compare the critical and scholarly statements within individual generations, in the process scrutinizing assumptions of consensus, continuity, and steady growth from ignorance to truth structurally implicit in many critical histories of America writers. An additional aim will be to place Pym within the larger contexts of Poe studies and of American studies and literary history. Indeed, this focus is inevitable, for a significant proportion of Pym commentators themselves have been doing one or the other.

This study includes comparison of American critical response at various historical moments to several other categories of respondents: the French, whose early and sustained enthusiasm for Poe included Pym from the beginning, and who have periodically generated original readings that have proved seminal in Americans’ perceptions; and second, the American public response, which has been more consistently positive than the critics’: from the second printing in 1856 on, Pym has never been out of print. While it has never rivaled his better-known stories and poems in popularity, nonetheless there has been almost always a variety of available editions, including widely accessible cheaply printed versions.

My objects of scrutiny will be reviews, studies and essays devoted to Pym, essays and books concerned with Poe’s work or life in general that offer some sort of reading of Pym (or, in some cases, imply an interpretation of Pym), and works on American literature that respond to Pym. Moreover, omission can constitute a response. Some of the most important “statements” are, for example, the loud silence on Poe in F. O. Matthiessen’s influential American Renaissance, and on Pym in Arthur Hobson Quinn’s biography, long the standard.

At present, Pym bibliography is hardly past the pioneer stage. As a bibliographical treatise, this study identifies numerous articles and book chapters on Pym that have escaped notice in the small, fragmentary bibliographic literature extant.¹ It discusses and relates studies far more extensively than these initial bibliographical essays do or were intended to do.

2
THE TEXT: FORMAL AND THEMATIC PROBLEMS

The responses to Pym, in their extremity and variety, seem to suggest a category of literature Carl Jung denominated “the Visionary Mode,” into which he placed, for example, Blake’s poetry and Joyce’s Ulysses. The reaction such literature generates, more than the category itself, interests Jung:

We are astonished, taken aback, confused, put on our guard or even disgusted—and we demand commentaries and explanations. We are reminded of nothing in everyday life, but rather of dreams, nighttime fears and the dark recesses of the mind that we sometimes sense with misgiving. The reading public for the most part repudiates this kind of writing, and literary critics are embarrassed by it. (210)

Jung’s list could be a gloss of the American critical reaction to Pym throughout most of its history. Frustration and uncertainty are evident, as critics have attempted to contain a work that has remained resistant.

The diverse reactions must be considered first as the natural result of unusually complex and eccentric subject matter. Of course, Pym confronts numerous riddles of the sort that Poe would later establish as conventions of the detective story plot in the more famous stories of Dupin and Legrand; and he is physically tested. A kind of nineteenth-century Indiana Jones, Pym must solve such puzzles as reading Augustus’s cryptic note in the whaler’s dark hold, decoding the strange language and behavior of the treacherous Tsalalians in time to save himself and Peters, and deciphering the petroglyphs carved into the hill (though he fails in nearly every such task he undertakes); and the story as a whole takes the shape of a mystery, as the reader speculates along with the “author” of the appended “Note” upon the whereabouts and the contents of the concluding portion of the narrative, the means of Pym’s escape from the cataract, the undisclosed “matter relative to the Pole itself,” and the meaning of those petroglyphs, which vaguely offer themselves as somehow the key to great mysteries.

Of course, it is more than a mystery story, and many readers have found it to be more than an adventure romance. In fact, the question of its identity or genre has been a persistent problem. The work variously presents itself as (and critics have labeled it as) a work of juvenilia, a fictionalized but verisimilar travel narrative (e.g., Robinson Crusoe), a fantastic or imaginary voyage (e.g., Gulliver’s Travels), a profound oneiric or psychological drama, a bildungsroman, a parody of all these, a satire in the forms of allegory, anatomy, or hoax, and even an apocalyptic or prophetic writing, to make a partial list. And scholars identify other, nonfictional forms embedded in the narrative. Yet the text violates the conventional and functional boundaries of every genre of which it seems to be an example.

Related to the indeterminacy of genre is a group of problems that stem from the instability of the narrative itself, including the narrative frame, structure, and subject. In most studies that address the frame, one finds either assumptions or argument about the significance of the relationship between the two chief narrators, Pym himself, and the “Mr. Poe,” author of the first three and one half chapters. Ostensibly, the “Preface,” ‘by’ Pym, stands as an explanation for the first chapters’ appearance in two issues of the Southern Literary Messenger the previous year, 1837, under the name of “Poe.” (This, of course, was true: Poe had published installments in the January and February numbers while he was Assistant Editor at the Messenger.) But rather than ignore this potential confusion, or handle it in some inconspicuous way, Poe exploits it, drawing attention to the relationship by accumulating layer upon layer of irony. Pym tells us he was reluctant to tell his true story, certain that the “positively Marvelous” incidents will be taken as “impudent … fiction.” ² We are told that “Mr. Poe” believed the story when Pym first related it to him, yet admits to having written the first part of the story under his own name, in his own words, and under the label of fiction. Ironically, as Pym tells us, readers responded with credulity, precisely as predicted by “Mr. Poe,” who presents this as evidence that Pym may “trust to the shrewdness and common sense of the public” to believe his story (actually, to trust in the public’s dullness, for it took as truth the chapters explicitly presented as fiction). Pym is thus persuaded that despite his “uncouth” style, “the facts … [will] carry with them sufficient evidence of their own authenticity.”

In yet another ironic twist, we learn in the appended “Note” from a third narrator, presumably another editor, that “Mr. Poe” will not cooperate in supplying the missing information of the abortive narrative, because he has changed his mind, and does not believe in the “entire truth” of the later chapters. Thus we apparently have from the real author an oblique, half-confession to his readers—after they have read it—that the narrative is imaginary, and that he has hoaxed them. In a final layer of irony, both the elaborate ruse and the confession prove supererogatory, since both the convoluted “Preface” and the fantastic narrative are incredible on their face, just as Pym had feared. Indeed, despite long-lived rumors, there is no evidence that a significant number of critics or other readers took it as a true account (Pollin Imaginary xv). Confusing rather than clarifying narrative authority, the frame has been much discussed.

Other aspects of the narrative structure are problematic. The most troubling, and for many readers annoying, must be the sudden stop, in a narrative that is either atypically concluded or simply unfinished. However one reads the ending, it is certainly mysterious, with respect to the events between the final journal entry of March 22, 1830, on one hand, and the writing of the “Note” and publication of the narrative, in July, 1838, on the other. There are some half-dozen oblique references to these eight and one half years, and to a promised “subsequent portion of this narrative” which never appears. We know that Pym spent these years on an extended Pacific Ocean voyage on a vessel (never named), and that they were “crowded with events” of the most “unconceivable character” (10.1). We know also that Pym dies suddenly, and that the remaining “two or three chapters”, which had not yet been put to type, had been lost with him.

What we do not know, then, is his means of escape from nearly certain death at the South Pole, as his canoe slips into the chasm; the details of his Pacific voyage (except that he visits the Galapagos Islands at some point, and there kills a tortoise with a four-foot long neck); and the circumstances of his “sudden and distressing death” in 1837 or 1838. Perhaps most disappointing, we never learn the identity of the white shrouded figure. This is to say, we never discover the great truth, scientific or theophanic, toward which the narrative drives as in a crescendo: “one of the most intensely exciting secrets which has ever engrossed” the “eye of science” (17.12).

A subject of even greater debate on narrative structure has been its continuity or disjunctiveness. In a process seemingly unlike that of any other text, even within the Poe canon, the narrative moves gradually from its own proffered rules of verisimilitude to assume a license for the bizarre and fantastic, introducing into the familiar world an alien geography with unique features and physical principles, and alien human and animal forms. Readers have described the effect as disorienting, even vertiginous, as we move through different kinds of discourse, compelled to employ within one literary world a variety of interpretive strategies we would normally use to relate to profoundly different kinds of texts (imaginary and factual, fantastic and verisimilar.)

A more specific focus of debate on structure has been the issue of the apparent discontinuity between the phases of Pym’s journey. Critics have pointed out in different ways that the narrative (or Pym himself) has no memory. When an episode is complete, or before it is, the narrative moves on, with little effort at accounting for loose ends or making transitions. For example, the agonizing death of Pym’s best friend before his own eyes has no lingering emotional effect. From this point onward he is forgotten—as is the dog Tiger, which simply vanishes. On the other hand, W. H. Auden insisted that “each [adventure] leads credibly into the next,” and called Pym “an object lesson in the art” of the adventure story (Carlson Recognition 222).

Many problems cluster about the narrative subject, Pym himself, as traveler and main narrator. Conventionally in the novel, the relatively stable, unified identity of the narrator is the chief centripetal force in the narrative process, which is constantly threatened with disintegration by the dispersive forces created by its own movement through time, space or both. As unfamiliar encounters and events multiply, pressure increases in proportion on the narrator and/or hero to assimilate the phenomena within a recognizable point of view; nonetheless we presume upon his ability to do so, and that his identity will remain stable, and his consciousness unified.

Nothing is stable about Arthur Gordon Pym, however. Wild swings in point of view represent him at one point as an innocent adolescent stowing away for a lark, and a scientifically educated adult, expert in the history of exploration and South Sea natural history. In Chapter Two Pym delights in such childish pranks as disguising himself as a stranger to his grandfather; within six months he possesses the personal authority to persuade Captain Guy against his better judgment to change the ship’s itinerary and steer for the pole (17.12).

Critics have frequently noticed that Pym has little sense of self as the novel opens, in contrast for instance to Dickens’s Pip, Oliver, or David Copperfield, who, though children, innately possess a full range of the best values of their society. Stranger yet, as psychological critics have pointed out, he never does develop a sense of self. Several of the myth- and psychoanalytic readings even argue for a gradual diffusion of Pym’s ego, as he journeys back either to primordial being or to the womb itself. In any case, his character is peculiarly passive, obtuse, and static, in a form of literature more or less predicated upon action and upon psychological development. Conspicuously absent is any interpretation by Pym during or after his travels of his own experiences—the ghastly mortification of the wrecked ship Grampus, the peculiar culture of the Tsalalians, the bizarre natural phenomena. Often he describes these with the casualness of a personality so empty, undeveloped, or deracinated as to be devoid of expectations, and thus incapable of surprise. This absence, together with Poe’s refusal to otherwise supply moral, anthropological or philosophical interpretation makes for one of the most completely indetermina...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Chapter One “An Impudent and Ingenious Fiction”: Introduction
• Chapter Two “We Do Not See Any Good End in Such Descriptions”: Moral Censure and the First Hundred Years
• Chapter Three “A Language from the Depths”: Psychology, Poe, and Pym
• Chapter Four “I Once Wrote a Very Silly Book”: The Problem of Form
• Chapter Five “A Correspondent Coloring”: The Historical Orientation
• Chapter Six “All the Outward Signs of Intelligibility”: Poe and Pym in the Dialogue of Modernism
• Afterword
• Bibliography Pym Criticism, 1838-1993
• General List
• Index