Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (105 page)

32
(p. 557) Chapter
XVII:
Much in this chapter derives from Morrell’s
Narrative
(see note 30, above). Again we encounter a section of the novel in which the fairly realistic details serve as dramatic relief for high-pitched sensationalism that follows. The chapter’s closing sentence, hinting of a contribution to science, only reinforces the air of realism.

33
(p. 563)
we could distinguish the word
Anamoo-moo!
and
Lama-Lama!: Although several conjectures about “meanings” in the islanders’ language are on record, the words may be only Poe’s invention, perhaps calculated to test readers’ acumen. This strange language is perhaps natural to people Pym first refers to as “strangers,” then, for the most part, “savages,” using “natives” seldom. On possible implications in the Tsalalians’ language, the most sensible critique is J. V. Ridgely’s “The Continuing Puzzle of
Arthur Gordon Pym:
Some Notes and Queries,”
Poe Newsletter
3:1 (June 1970), pp. 5-6. That there may have been implications of darkness and shadiness (in the sense of deception) in
Tsalemon-Psalemoun
(the king’s name) and
Tsalal,
in chapter XXV (see p. 603), which may derive from Hebrew or African roots, as well as suggesting the name “Solomon,” is remarked by Burton R. Pollin, ed., in
Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe,
Vol. 1:
The Imaginary Voyages,
pp. 351—352 (see “For Further Reading”). If any implication of Solomon, the king of ancient Israel reputed for great wisdom, was Poe’s intent, it may join other ironies in the book: Solomon’s wisdom in deciding the matter of a child and the two women who claimed it produced momentarily startling conditions, akin to many in Poe’s novel.

34
(p. 565)
We also saw some
biche de mer
in the hands of one of the savages, who was greedily devouring it in its natural state:
The ocean-dweller known as
bêche de mer
(from the Portuguese
bicho do mar,
meaning “sea worm”) also goes by the names sea slug, sea cucumber, and trepang. Poe’s preference for the less common term (which implies an animal) suggests that the islanders are more carnivorous than vegetarian. These organisms are ordinarily found in Australia and Oriental regions. That such life flourishes in this locale suggests how far behind Pym’s travels and adventures have left the civilized, the expected, and the rational. What follows only reinforces such transfers into a strange world—of physical and mental geography. Just so, Pym’s symbolic journey into the self may be considered a movement from flesh to spirituality, thereby suggesting why Nu-Nu dies before the merger occurs.

35
(p. 567)
The phenomena of this water formed the first definite link in that vast chain of apparent miracles with which I was destined to be at length encircled:
This strange water may be inspired by certain American springs credited with medicinal qualities, of which Poe was aware. It also reinforces Pym’s departure from an everyday world to move deeper into one of nonrationality. His comment that concludes chapter XVIII, regarding the “apparent miracles with which I was destined to be at length encircled,” carries along the appearance-reality experiences that indeed ever more firmly surround him. Pym again refers to appearance in the islanders’ actions as chapter XIX opens. The circle analogy relates to those whirlpools, spirals, and other means of literally and symbolically dizzying a character, which are among Poe’s favorite motifs for psychological disorder.

36
(p. 578)
They accordingly turned, and were scrambling back ... the day of universal dissolution was at hand:
The situation that permits Pym and his companions to remain safe while the others are buried alive is paradoxical, to understate. Whether this delivery from death is an example of Poe’s carelessness or his calculated creation of incredibility to test readers cannot be determined.

37
(p. 579)
As soon as I could collect my scattered senses, I found myself nearly suffocated.... The blackness of darkness which envelops the victim ... never to be conceived:
Another incredibility or irony occurs here; does Pym mean that Peters’s head is actually near his own, or does he simply suggest that positioning as an expression of his overwhelming confusion, which would be plausible, given his “scattered senses”? The “blackness of darkness” is biblical (Jude 13, King James Version), and in context it merges physical and psychological upset linked with Poe’s ever-popular theme of premature burial. Jude also mentions sea voyaging, which would likewise be relevant here.

38
(p. 580)
With sorrowful hearts, therefore, we left the corpse to its fate, and again made our way to the bend:
That Wilson Allen dies in this avalanche may be symbolic, given that not long after
Pym
appeared Poe’s renowned tales of the importance of will, “Ligeia” and “William Wilson” in particular, were also published. Some readers think that this character’s surname was a variant spelling of Allan, and that Poe was being autobiographical in “burying” his late foster father, John Allan. At this point in the novel, the disappearance of will may point strongly toward the accelerating onset of fantasy.

39
(p. 585)
the cordage, sails, and every thing movable on deck demolished as if by magic:
The taking and destruction of the Jane Guy, called now only the Jane, harks back to the theme of vicious pursuit of a hapless female, usually with sexual expectations on the villain’s part. As is also usually the outcome in such episodes in earlier Gothics, the “taken” female dies, and so here the ship is destroyed by the marauders’ actions. It may be significant that males destroy the female at this point, which ploy seems to reverse in the final chapter. Here, too, and in following paragraphs, the notion of magic is introduced; such magic continues to the end of the novel.

40
(p. 587)
First of all there came a smart shock (which we felt as distinctly where we were as if we had been slightly galvanized), but unattended with any visible signs of an explosion:
Poe uses
galvanized
in the sense of being shocked with a battery’s electric charge. This is one more example of Poe’s incorporating timely technology into his fiction: The Galvanic battery, an electric battery invented by Italian physicist Luigi Galvani (1737-1798), had gained attention in popular culture by the 1830s. Thus we find another bit of realism amid the increasingly weird occurrences within the novel.

41
(p. 589)
Chapter XXIII:
The first edition of
Pym
contains two chapters numbered XXIII, which stand uncorrected in Griswold’s edition of Poe’s works (1856). I have changed the chapter numerals to proceed chronologically, and so I number the second “chapter XXIII” as XXIV and the last chapter XXV.

42
(p. 597)
a dusky, fiendish, and filmy figure stood immediately beneath me.... At length, seeing me totter, he hastened to ascend to my rescue, and arrived just in time for my preservation:
In this incident, Pym initially supposes that a supernatural figure threatens him, only to regain clear consciousness and realize how faulty his vision was, and that Peters has rescued him; it parallels Pym’s supposing that Tiger is some horrendous antagonist, but soon learning the actuality of the situation.

43
(pp. 597—598)
The place was one of singular wildness ... immense scorpions were seen, and various reptiles not elsewhere to be found in the high latitudes:
The desolation here compares with that in “The Valley of Unrest,” “Silence—A Fable,” and the opening of “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

44
(p. 601)
The ribs were of a tough osier, well adapted to the purpose for which it was used:
Osier is a pliable willow twig used in basket and furniture making. This substance may have been mentioned with irony because its frail quality is but one more frailty in the canoe and the characters themselves, they having sustained considerable physical and emotional batterings.

45
(p. 602)
in short, having all the wild variations of the Aurora Borealis:
The aurora borealis is a luminous nighttime phenomenon that occurs in the atmosphere of Earth’s northern hemisphere; in the southern hemisphere, where Pym is, such a phenomenon is termed the aurora australis. Pym’s allusion to its vaporous appearance accelerates his own symbolic journey into visually obscure and emotionally uncertain regions.

46
(p. 603)
they were governed by a common king, named
Tsalemon or Psalemoun,
who resided in one of the smallest of the islands:
Various speculations about the meaning of these names have been offered; but, as with other strange language employed, they may represent Poe’s comic intent, or they may be additional signposts that imply a defiance of establishing absolute, exclusive meaning by those within the novel and by readers. See note 33, above, for elaboration on possibilities in Nu-Nu’s words. If Nu-Nu’s name means “to deny”—as Sydney Kaplan submits in her edition,
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,
New York: Hill and Wang, 1960, p. xviii—then his death just before the mysterious white figure looms fittingly concludes one variety of symbolism in the novel. The Tsalalians have destroyed the Jane, as the explorers’ ship is termed in that episode, signifying that the savages had killed a representative of the female principle (see note 39, above). Such destruction links these characters with other imbalancing males in the Poe canon—for example, Roderick Usher and the narrators in “Berenice,” “Morella,” Ligeia,” and “The Black Cat” (and perhaps also the king in ”Hop-Frog”). Naturally, then, such a character could not merge with femininity, as may be symbolized in the shrouded figure as Pym’s narrative closes.

47
(p.603)
The commencement of the words
Tsalemon
and
Tsalal
was given with a prolonged hissing sound ... which was precisely the same with the note of the black bittern we had eaten up on the summit of the hill:
Although hissing may be more commonplace in snakes, frightened or angry ducks, geese, and swans also make hissing sounds. These may register another linkage of human and animal or otherwise nonhuman, as we have seen in connection with the demonic cook or the characterization of Peters. They may also hint of the futility to fix meanings as regards the novel, particularly in its later chapters.

48
(pp. 603—604)
I felt
a numbness
of body and mind
—
a dreaminess of sensation
—
but this was all:
Pym yields even more to dreaminess—that is, journeying into the depths of the self—than his previous voyagings have effected. He is about to move beyond adolescent immaturity and to gain character by merging with the female principle in life, which will result in his gaining balance or integration within the self. His feelings are plausible in such a growth pattern in maturing. Poe’s presentations of masculine-feminine balancings may be seen as forerunners of twentieth-century medical viewpoints that argue that an individual may not be so exclusively masculine or feminine as many traditional distinctions would dictate.

49
(p. 605)
And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow:
As Camille Paglia has argued, Pym and Peters seem to be merging with a female principle or nature mother, and Pym’s voyaging is actually ”a journey to the heart of creation”
(see Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson,
London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990, pp. 579-580, 590-591). Whether the contrast of the giant shrouded figure’s whiteness with that of the dead Nu-Nu’s blackness has anything to do with racial paranoias to which, some have contended, Poe subscribed is eminently debatable. Nu-Nu is representative of harmful deceit and savagery, which qualities may well be aligned with the color black, having no racial stigma but rather based on age-old beliefs that black symbolizes death, which for many (for example, the masqueraders in ”The Masque of the Red Death”) is inevitably associated with dissolution and destruction. White, on the other hand, has equally long associations with radiance, which in the Poe canon (and in his awareness that names like Helen derive from root meanings of dazzling light, indeed lightning) is typically a positive, harmonizing factor in life. According to legend, Helen of Troy was the most beautiful woman in the world. Poe is quick to transpose the concept of beauty to ideal planes rather than to confine it solely to physical features, and that treatment seems to be consonant with the conclusion of his novel. Edward H. Davidson, in
Poe: A Critical Study,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957, chapter 6, argues along similar lines, contending that Pym matures out of ignorance to an awareness of unity.