Text: William Peden, “Prologue to a Dark Journey: The ‘Opening’ to Poe's Pym,” Papers on Poe, 1972, pp. 84-91

[page 84, unnumbered:]

William Peden

UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI

 

Prologue to a Dark Journey:
The “Opening” to Poe's Pym

 

THE NARRATIVE of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe's only novel, was first published in book form in 1838, though the first three chapters and part of the fourth had appeared early in 1837 in the Southern Literary Messenger. Mildly successful as a hoax in England but a conspicuous failure as far as American readers and critics were concerned, Pym was to all intents and purposes forgotten in America for more than a century. In recent years it has been “discovered” and particularly during the last decade has become perhaps the most controversial and the most written about of all of Poe's works. In the process Pym has been labelled almost everything: profoundly oneiric drama, great adventure story, reflection of white racism, tragedy of cosmic forces, search for the will of God, sustained symbol of a single page of writing [!], hoax pure and simple.*

Were Pym essentially a hoax, it would warrant the 19th and early 20th century neglect which it survived. Read exclusively or primarily on the literal level, it soon becomes a bore: the accumulation of horrors palls, the factual passages drag. Basically, however, the novel is — among other things — a book about death or, to speak more specifically, about its protagonists drift towards death. Pym is as much proto type of 20th century Existential non-hero as Camus’ Meursault, Ionesco's Bérenger, or Beckett's Godot. Moreover, it seems to me that from the very beginnings Poe is working with a preconceived — [page 85:] if only vaguely — effect. In these terms I would like to discuss the “prologue” to Pym's dark journey, Chapter One.

So the novel begins: consciously prosaic, deliberately low-keyed, the best way to establish from the outset the illusion of reality; dry as dust, with the exception of the detail about Mr. Ricketts, who immediately thereafter vanishes from the pages of Pym and literary history. This is the method of Defoe and his imitators, and it comes as no surprise that Poe had recently reviewed a new edition of Robinson Crusoe in which he had commented particularly on Defoe's use of realistic detail and his “potent magic of verisimilitude.”

The opening paragraph continues: at the age of sixteen,(2) Poe leaves Mr. Ricketts’ school for Mr. E. Ronald's “academy on the hill” (p. 5). Here he becomes intimate with Augustus Barnard, the son of a New Bedford sea captain. Two years older than Pym, Augustus is a tall talker who fascinates Arthur with tales of high adventure in the South Pacific where he had accompanied his father on a whaling voyage. The boys soon become fast friends:(3) “I used frequently to go home with him, and remain all day, and sometimes all night. We occupied the same bed, and he would be sure to keep me awake un til almost light, telling me stories of ... places he had visited in his travels” (p. 5).

Pym is fascinated by these stories. No landlubber — he owns a sail boat, the Ariel — he soon has the “greatest desire” to go to sea, and he and Augustus habitually take the Ariel on “some of the maddest freaks in the world” (p. 6).

The remainder of the chapter is a detailed account of one of these “mad freaks.” Of all the chapters in Pym, it has been either ignored [page 86:] or, at best, dismissed as essentially unimportant. This is a mistake, as I hope to suggest.

Following an evening of drinking at Captain Barnard's, Arthur and Augustus decide to go “out on a frolic with the boat” (p. 6). The episode begins with lines more anticipatory of Hemingway than reminiscent of Defoe. This might be Nick Adams speaking:

The madcap mood suddenly changes. The wind increases, the Ariel is “fast getting out of the lee of the land” and Pym, we are told, “At this period ... knew little about the management of a boat” (p. 7). Because of the sudden tension in the scene, the reader is not likely to stop to ponder why Pym knows so little about “the management of a boat.” A boy reared near the sea, fascinated by the sea, and in the habit of sailing on some of the “maddest freaks in the world”? A boy who is owner of a sailboat “rigged sloop-fashion” and capable of holding “ten persons without much crowding” (p. 5)? Difficult to believe? Fantastic? Yes, and I think deliberately so. It is the first of a series of hints to the reader, nudgings of his elbow as it were, signposts on the way to a strange journey which will lead to the eventual meaningless destruction of Pym, a destruction no less real despite the fact that Poe, handcuffed as he was by his choice of the first-person protagonist's point-of-view, had to allow Pym to survive the final confrontation with the White Figure of the last chapter.

Augustus, Pym soon realizes, is “drunk — beastly drunk” (p. 8) and soon passes out in the hold of the Ariel. Pym is quickly reduced to a quavering mass of protoplasm: “It is hardly possible to conceive the extremity of my terror. ...I knew that I was altogether incapable of managing the boat” (p. 8); he is so agitated that he does not have sufficient practical sense — or conditioned reflexes — to seize the tiller which has slipped from Augustus's fingers. At this juncture a terrible cry seems to “pervade the whole atmosphere,” a “loud and long scream or yell, as if from the throats of a thousand demons,”(4) Pym tumbles “insensible” upon the body of Augustus, and reviving, finds [page 87:] Augustus, “paler than death ... busily occupied in chafing my hands” (p. 9). The “mystery” is quickly explained: the boys have been run down by a whaler, the Penguin, bound for Nantucket: the terrible screams were warning shouts from the crew. The captain of the Penguin decides to proceed on course but the “justly indignant” (p. 10) first mate disobeys orders, the Penguin is turned about, and — aided by the moon which was “still shining brightly”’ — a jolly boat is lowered. “The Starboard side of the vessel” emerges from the “water nearly as far as her keel, ... [and] the body of a man was seen to be affixed ... to the smooth and shining bottom.” It is Pym's, “beating violently ... with every movement of the hull.” After several unsuccessful attempts, Pym is “disengaged” from his “perilous situation” and the reader is subsequently informed that he had been attached to the hull of the Penguin by the head of a broken timber bolt which had made its way “through the back part of ... [Pym's] neck, forcing itself out between two sinews and just below the right ear” (p. 11).(5) Augustus is similarly rescued, though the wind was “now blowing almost a hurricane” (p. 12) and the Penguin manages to make port “about nine” in the morning (p. 13). But these hallucinated, surreal events during what could not have been more than five or six hours on the water(6) fade into insignificance beside the ultimate, if unviolent, absurdity with which Poe concludes the chapter.

“Schoolboys can accomplish wonders in the way of deception” indeed! Screams heard during a storm, a moon which shines brightly during a tempest, a first mate who disobeys his captain's orders during a crisis and a captain who meekly submits to this disobedience, an in sensible boy who survives at least ten minutes under water,(7) two fantastic rescues at sea, a pair of survivors who calmly sit down at breakfast the following morning as though nothing unusual had happened, and a parent oblivious of the fact that his son's companion had had a bolt thrust through his neck a few hours before.(8)

It would be presumptuous to state dogmatically that such incongruities, absurdities, and impossibilities are carefully and deliberately [page 88:] planted by Poe in this opening chapter to help prepare the reader for the glut of violence and the surreal in the next section of his novel — the events aboard the Grampus — which in turn will lead him and Pym to the even more terrifying metaphysical terrors of the Tsalal episodes. But in view of Poe's almost obsessive preoccupation with the esthetics of literature, his concern for form, and his insistence that every detail in a work of fiction serve to aid in “establishing ... [a] preconceived effect” and that in every composition “there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design,”(9) it is difficult to account for such elements as simply the result of ineptitude, carelessness, or immaturity. After all, Poe had been writing for several years and had produced some pretty good stories and poems when this opening chapter of Pym was written(10) I find it similarly difficult to attribute to Poe's ignorance or sloppiness those sillinesses and anachronisms concerning boats, ships, and the sea, particularly when one considers Poe's habit of ransacking encyclopedias, reference books and the work of his contemporaries, literary and otherwise. The same can be said in connection with his similarly engrained habit of pretending to an expertise and knowledge ability which he did not really possess.(11)

It is highly probable that Poe began Pym as a parody, burlesque, or hoax or some combination of all of these, as he had some of his earlier stories. But I think he envisioned Pym as more than any of these, and as more than an amazing story of adventure in the tradition of Defoe or a pot-boiler engendered by contemporary interest in polar exploration or a publisher's exhortation.(12) In spite of the fact that he composed the novel in fits and starts over a period of many months of harrassments, frustrations, and interruptions, it seems to me that from the beginnings or almost from the beginnings Poe is working in terms of a preconceived, if only barely formulated, concept. With almost Joycean ingenuity or Nabokovian slyness, Poe performs, in chapter one, various word tricks identifying himself with Pym;(13) in the same chapter, and for similar reasons, he employs distortion, in congruity, and the consciously absurd for similar reasons: to help pre pare the reader for a different kind of ‘voyage novel”; and in the final version, he goes so far as to have Pym suggest that his voyages and adventure were more fable than fiction or simulated fact.(14)

More symbol than spoof?

We can never know, of course, how this remarkable novel was conceived and how it developed. Since even the creator of a work of [page 89:] fiction is often unaware of such mysteries, it is presumptuous for a critic a century or more after the fact to do much more than hazard a timid suggestion. It seems to me that as Pym progressed, the possibilities inherent in the subject matter and the form seized Poe's imagination, transcended their own boundaries, and, in short, the work-in progress passed from the realm of competent commercial carpentry into art. (The same thing had happened with some of Poe's earlier stories. A genius in spite of himself, Poe often transcended the limitations and boundaries of his sources; at his best he transformed the sludge and bilge-water of his predecessors into something larger and more meaningful, something illuminated by his own peculiar genius.)

Pym has meant many things to many readers, which is perhaps the ultimate proof, if proof be needed, of its greatness. I read it as a night journey, a journey at once both physical and metaphysical. Following the Ariel prologue, aboard the Grampus, the Jane Guy, and a Tsalalian canoe, Pym will journey beyond the known limits of the physical world. At the same time, as Arthur-Augustus-Peters he will journey beyond the limits of himself, beyond the limits of his own mind; on this plunge into the unknown he will, indeed, blow his own mind. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is a dark voyage from which there is no return, an existentialist trip from nothingness to nothingness. And this journey which begins with mutiny aboard the Grampus and culminates on the warm South Polar seas is consciously and cunningly charted with signposts as unmistakeable as Hawthorne's carefully-labelled symbols or emblems. Blaze on the tree, spoor on the damp leaf, they lead the reader from the familiar to the strange, from the known to the unknown. In these terms and by means of such devices Poe has created his own special province where the real, the unreal, and the surreal coalesce or coagulate: inscape from which all familiar signs eventually are obliterated or removed and over which only Death “looks gigantically down.”

[page 89:]

NOTES

* BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. In his admirable introduction to Pym (American Century Series [Hill and Wang], 1960), Sidney Kaplan summarizes these varying attitudes and interpretations; his essay is the most perceptive reading of Pym to that date. The fact that some of Mr. Kaplan's speculations — specifically, his comments concerning the Hebraic origins of the language of the Tsalalians — have been questioned does not minimize the importance of his comments. Other indispensable readings are Marie Bonaparte's The Life and Works of [page 90:] Edgar Allan Poe: A Psychoanalytic Study (1933; rpt. London, 1949), Edward H. Davidson's Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), and Patrick F. Quinn's The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale, Ill., 1957). Among the many articles published since Kaplan's Pym, I have benefitted most (although I disagree with the authors’ conclusions) from J. V. Ridgely and Iola S. Haverstick's “Chartless Voyage: the Many Narratives of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, VIII, No. 1 (Spring 1966), 63-80. I am particularly indebted, in this essay and its sequel, to the work of two of my graduate students, Edward Schaefer of the University of Missouri and Robert Constant of the University of Maryland.

1 This and subsequent references to or quotations from Pym are from Sidney Kaplan's American Century Series edition.

2 Pym is fourteen in the version appearing in the Southern Literary Messenger, January 1837. Ridgely and Haverstick, “Chartless Voyage,” discuss the significant differences between the text originally appearing in the Southern Literary Messenger (Jan. and Feb. 1837) and the revised book edition published by Harper's (pp. 65-67).

3 Eventually, during the Grampus sections, Augustus will become Pym's alter ego, his Doppelgänger.

4 These shrieks are picked up in subsequent chapters of the novel, before other catastrophes; such elements give a unity of sorts to a work not particularly noted for its structural expertise.

5 Like the screams which had preceded the collision, injuries to the throat appear and re appear and reenforce the structure of the novel: during the mutiny on the Grampus, for example, the mate seizes Augustus by the throat; Peters later throttles Hicks; Pym's dog Tiger kills Jones by biting his throat; Parker grabs Pym by the throat after Pym opposes his suggestion of cannibalism.

6 The party at Mr. Barnard's had broken up “near one” in the morning and the boys have been in bed about “half an hour” before Augustus, aroused from his drunken slumber, decided to “go out on a frolic with the boat” (p. 6).

7 Poe states specifically (p. 10) that five minutes elapsed from the time the Penguin rams the Ariel until the Penguin is turned back into the teeth of the storm; we can conjecture that at least another five minutes must have elapsed for the lowering of the jolly boat, the discovery of Pym, and his ultimate rescue after ‘several unsuccessful attempts” to remove his body from the hull (p. 11). Poe's very specific reckoning of elapsed time can be explained, it seems to me, only in the terms I have suggested: conscious use of the Absurd, as deliberate and effective as anything in Ionesco or Beckett.

8 To cap this carnival of what seems must be the consciously absurd, Pym further comments: “I verily believe not one of our friends in Nantucket had the slightest suspicion that the terrible story told by some sailors in town of their having run down a vessel at sea and drowned some thirty or forty poor devils, had reference either to the Ariel, my companion or myself” (p. 14).

9 From Poe's famous review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, published in 1842. Though written years after the completion of Pym, the ideas expressed here are ones which Poe had been concerned with for years.

10 Much has been written concerning the composition of Pym, and the subsequent effect of the delays in composition upon the structure and content of the novel. L. Moffitt Cecil argues that Pym is in actuality “two separate short narratives” which Poe “palmed off on the reading world”: “The Two Narratives of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, V, No. 2 (Summer 1963), 232. Ridgely and Haverstick, on the other hand, present very convincing evidence that there were five stages in the composition, and that the [page 91:] material of stage one — the first three chapters and part of the fourth — was composed late in 1836 (“Chartless Voyage,” particularly pp. 66-67).

11 This has particular relevance to Pym because of the many passages which Poe is known to have “borrowed” from a variety of sources. See James O. Bailey, “Sources of Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym ..., “PMLA, LVII (1942), 513-535; Ridgely and Haverstick; Sidney Kaplan.

12 Harper's had rejected a collection of Poe's stories with the suggestion that their readers preferred a longer work of fiction: Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York, 1941), pp. 250-251.

13 Arthur Gordon Pym — Edgar Allan Poe, Edgarton: such similarities seem so obvious one wonders why they had not been commented on from the beginnings; similar examples are found in subsequent chapters.

14 “ ... in spite of the air of fable ... the public were still not at all disposed to receive it [Pym] as fable” (p. 2; italics mine). Compare, too, the sly statement in Poe's afterword following the “late sudden and distressing death of Mr. Pym”: “Conclusions such as these [the hieroglyphs of chapter 23] open a wide field for speculation and exciting conjecture. They should be regarded, perhaps, in connection with some of the most faintly detailed incidents of the narrative ...” (pp. 196-198).