Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (7 page)

Much in the foregoing pages also applies with equal validity to Poe’s novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which continues to defy readers’ efforts at interpretation. When Poe enlisted acclaimed American author James Kirke Paulding in a failed effort to get “Tales of the Folio Club” published by the prominent firm of Harpers’, Paulding praised the project but noted that it was too rarified for average readers. He counseled Poe instead to use his talents for a novel featuring realistic, if intermittently comic, treatment of aspects of American life that might benefit from humorous lights being thrown upon them. Although Poe heeded Paulding’s advice by using the timely theme of polar exploration (here to the Antarctic) in
Pym
and by using comedy, the subtleties and coded nature of that comedy have confounded many readers. The extended title of the book and its preface alert us that truth-versus-fiction or appearance-versus-reality themes are significant. The vessels in which Pym sails, many characters’ names, including Pym’s own (which may be an anagram for “imp”), the disquisition on penguins, plus many inconsistencies, betray comic underpinnings. Far more easily apprehended, though, are the horrifics: Details of revolting illness, the physical consequences of mutiny aboard ship, shipwrecks, savage barbarism, and live burial course through the novel. Indeed, if “horror” is distinguished from “terror” because the former involves sensory experience (contact with repulsive smells or loathsome tangible objects, bodily pain) and the latter defines anguish, fear, hysteria, attraction-repulsion (emotional upheavals only), then
Pym
is replete with both. Perhaps Poe’s ironic tendency underlies many passages of disgusting details as deliberate bait that would separate careful from superficial readers. Not long before, writing as a critic, he had censured what he termed the “mere
physique
of the horrible” in William Gilmore Simms’s novel
The Partisan: A Tale of the Revolution
(1835), which, however, contains far less physical discomfort, excruciating pain, torture, and death than we find in
Pym.

If Poe shifted his imaginative direction during the composition of
Pym,
it’s no wonder that its heterogeneous features confuse but entice readers. To some extent Poe builds on the mode of the boy’s adventure story enjoyed by many nineteenth-century readers. The adventures of young Pym and his great friend, Augustus Barnard, anticipate those of Tom and Huck in
Tom Sawyer
and
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
and of Holden Caulfield in
The Catcher in the Rye.
The adventures of Poe’s youths fall very much into the category of the naughty but not malicious or destructive boy in such fiction. Intoxication, the boys’ frolicking in a boat, the
Ariel
(perhaps an allusion to the boat that upset and caused the British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s early death), the preposterousness in Pym’s first accident and his rapid recovery may reasonably suggest that
Pym
shares affinities with the Folio Club tales, as do the motifs of food and drink, along with incredible plunderings from and mimickings of travel books and repeated situational and stylistic extravagances that characterize this novel. One might surmise that much in
Pym
came out of a bottle from the same shelf as “MS. Found in a Bottle.”

Regarding another topic, should we, for instance, impute racism to the seemingly evident imputations of a widening divergence between North and South in the 1830s? Does the Tsalal natives’ conduct represent fears of African-American slave uprisings against white oppressors in the South? Since more than enough evidence has been marshaled to indicate that Poe was not the paranoid racist some critics have discerned—many who call him racist use as sure “proof” material not written by or unshakably endorsed by him—we cannot brand him with that label.
⁹
Moreover, is the racism of the story Poe’s own, or is he playing upon widespread attitudes of others, to produce a book that would sell? He certainly kept his finger on the pulse of popular attitudes.

Pym
is a novel about a protagonist’s spiritual-sexual growth; not only is the chief theme in
Pym
not racist, but Poe may have been actually ahead of his time, in positing that Pym had developed into a post-adolescent stage in which he was prepared, if warily, to merge with the female presence represented by the giant, white-shrouded human figure.
¹⁰
Pym draws the other voyagers with him, although moving in this way toward an inescapable unknown may have troubled him and his Tsalalian hostage, if not Dirk Peters (whose names merge sexuality and spirituality). Poe may indeed have had racial fantasies, but in
Pym
such fantasies seem to exist in the context of melding rather than in separation. Within this scheme, Nu-Nu, a member of a decidedly anti-feminine culture—emphasized in the destruction of the
Jane Guy,
a ship contextualized with notable femininity—is not equal to a merger with the feminine toward which Pym and Peters are drawn; Nu-Nu’s death may symbolize his position. If
Pym
is a work in which we see probings of irrationality in the human self (and “self,” singly or in compound words, resonates throughout the novel much like a refrain in a poem or piece of music), then the final scene, where masculine and feminine are inevitably going to merge, may symbolize an awe-inspiring plunge into depths hitherto only glimpsed. If Pym is continuing to mature, then that continuation plausibly incorporates mystery as a concomitant to true identity.

Such a reading, of course, offers but one approach to Poe’s novel. Others suggest that
Pym
may be incomplete because Poe had no idea where to go with his creation, or that incompletion may signal his consciously essaying the Romantic fragment that became a respectable form in the early nineteenth century, as exemplified in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” several Wordsworth poems, Keats’s “Hyperion,” Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life,” and Byron’s
Don Juan.
This structure of incompletion or tentativeness paves the way for what has subsequently become known as Modernism in literature. Not too long after it was published and reviewers remarked its heterogeneity, Poe called
Pym
a “silly book,” but when he sought to plume himself as an author, he always cited it as one of his accomplishments. If, according to Webster‘s, “silly” may mean “contrary to reason,” Poe, being Poe, may have knowingly chosen this designation to confute his detractors.

What can one say in conclusion regarding Poe’s ongoing appeal? First, his creative works have survived considerable deprecation to emerge as deservedly ranking with those of other authors whose achievements are often considered far more artistic than his own. Part of the low esteem for Poe’s poems and fiction has come about because readers today are often unwilling to approach literature with their ears as well as their eyes. Thus Poe’s intent to enlist hearing as well as seeing from his audiences may have been blunted by shifts in readers’ responses. Second, since connections of his creative work with literary Gothicism have been apparent since he began to publish, and since Gothic tradition overall had to wait until the later twentieth century before it gained recognition, Poe’s work was likewise bypassed by many until comparatively recently.

A consensus has emerged, however, that Poe’s horror writings merit considered attention. Poe realized that stock character types and their worlds, long familiar in antecedent Gothicism, could be manipulated into representations of the human mind (symbolized in weird castles, mansions, dark pits, or cellars) under stress (represented by the overwrought characters themselves, who repeatedly seem to be living creatures moving with and through dizzying experiences inside and “haunting” those minds just described). He discerned that he could create a sustained “effect” or impression of such upheavals in short poems and, for the most part, in brief fictions,
Pym
being a notable exception. Poe’s horrors thus continue to fascinate readers because they indeed touch on timeless, existential anxieties common to people everywhere. His works therefore are seldom set in a specific historical time. Poe’s renown for literary succinctness of course validates his intent; he wrote best with brevity. That “best” emanated, however, from his awareness that intensity cannot be long sustained in much related to human nature, and that human emotions are kaleidoscopic. Therefore he repeatedly used lyric poetry and short stories as his most comfortable media for unfolding the interior of the human mind, whether employing weird landscapes (“Ulalume”) or drawing on the haunted-castle theme from earlier Gothics to enhance the emotional turmoil in his characters. To press this point home, Poe often shaped his material to suggest the reader’s entry into the human head, which frames the mind. Thus the dark windings of interiors, with movements spiraling up or down, create rich textures and dizzying effects, encompassing issues of gender, sexuality, marriage—all of which concern human identity. Whatever form he uses, Poe aims for a vivid, intense impression, and such intensity cannot be lengthened into extended form without diminishing the effect.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
is also a short novel, for its time, albeit the prose expression within that book displays an unmistakable repetitiveness, perhaps to reinforce the pervasive aura of a hypnotic dream-world into which Pym journeys.

Brevity in Poe’s creative writings overall is analogous to brevity in a dream: The dreamer moves from recognizable reality further into nonrational realms, the climax arrives, and the dream, or nightmare, ceases. Poe’s nightmare vision, to define his principal literary vision more precisely, anticipates those in the works of numerous later writers, and for such outreach he should be remembered as having contributed significantly to as many major currents as to eddies in literary waters.
¹¹
What has sometimes been mischaracterized as mere hack-work, created out of an inadequacy and inability to rise to greater heights, may today reveal more about some readers’ limitations than about any liabilities in Poe’s artistic vision and achievement.

Benjamin F. Fisher,
Professor of English at the University of Missis sippi, has published extensively on Poe and many other subjects in American, Victorian, and Gothic studies. He is currently at work on two books and a monograph about Poe. Fisher is on the editorial boards of
Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism, Edgar Allan Poe Review, Victorian Poetry, Frank Norris Studies, Gothic Studies, Simms Review,
and
English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920,
and he is past president of the Poe Studies Association and chairman of the Speakers Series of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. He was awarded a Governor’s Citation in the state of Maryland for outstanding contributions to Poe studies and has won several awards for outstanding teaching.

1
Palmer C. Holt, “Poe and H. N. Coleridge’s Greek Classic Poets: ‘Pinakidia,’ ‘Politian,’ and ‘Morella’ Sources,”
American Literature
34 (1962), pp. 8-30. I add here my grateful acknowledgment of the scholarship in
Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe,
edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 3 vols., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969-1978. Although I have not used the text, I have also often found helpful the annotations by Burton R. Pollin, ed., in
Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe,
Boston: Twayne, 1981; vol. 1:
Imaginary Voyages.

2
A fine overview of Gothicism is Devendra Prasad Varma’s
The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England: Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences,
London: Arthur Barker, 1957. I assess Dunlap’s imitating of American literary Gothicism in my “William Dunlap, American Gothic Dramatist,” in
Transactions of the Samuel Johnson Society of the Northwest
17 (1988), pp. 167-190. See also Clark Griffith’s “Poe and the Gothic,” in
Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe,
edited by Eric W. Carlson, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987, pp. 127-133; and my “Poe and the Gothic Tradition,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe,
edited by Kevin J. Hayes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 72-91. Especially good on many points concerning Poe is editor Richard P. Benton’s
The Gothic Tradition in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: A Symposium in Two Parts,
a special double number of ESQ:
A Journal of the American Renaissance
18:1 & 2 (1972). Benton’s introductory overview, “The Problems of Literary Gothicism,” sets forth excellent perceptions on American Gothicism from its early manifestations to the later twentieth century.

3
Dennis W. Eddings, “Theme and Parody in ‘The Raven’,” in
Poe and His Times: The Artist and His Milieu,
edited by Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV, Baltimore, MD: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1990, pp. 209-217.

4
The best overview of this project is Alexander Hammond’s “A Reconstruction of Poe’s 1833
Tales of the Folio Club,”
in
Poe Studies
5 (December 1972), pp. 25-32; and his “Further Notes on Poe’s Folio Club Tales,”
Poe Studies
8 (December 1975), pp. 38-42. See also my
The Very Spirit of Cordiality: The Literary Uses of Alcohol and Alcoholism in the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe,
Baltimore, MD: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1978.

5
Strangely, Mabbott—in
Collected Works,
vol. 2, p. 238—is reluctant to credit this tale with any value, citing in support Robert Louis Stevenson’s denigration dating from 1875. A more convincing critique is Louis A. Renza’s “Poe’s King: Playing it Close to the Pest,” in
Edgar Allan Poe Review
2:2 (2001), pp. 3-18.

6
Such is the argument of Clark Griffith in “Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ and the English Romantics,” in
University of Toronto Quarterly
24 (1954), pp. 8-25.

7
I assess this technique in “Blackwood Articles à la Poe: How to Make a False Start Pay,” in
Perspectives on Poe,
edited by D. Ramakrishna, New Delhi: APC Publications, 1996, pp. 63-82.