Text: J. V. Ridgely, “The End of Pym and the Ending of Pym,” Papers on Poe, 1972, pp. 104-112

[page 104, unnumbered:]

J. V. Ridgely

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

 

The End of Pym and
the Ending of Pym

 

IN THE concluding “Note” to Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the anonymous “editor,” after showily decoding the mysterious chasms and inscriptions on Tsalal, slips into a teasing tone as he adds: “Conclusions such as these open a wide field for speculation and exciting conjecture. They should be regarded, perhaps, in connexion with some of the most faintly-detailed incidents of the narrative; although in no visible manner is this chain of connexion complete.” Now no one could have been more aware than Poe himself as he finally sent Pym to press in July 1838 that his entire narrative “chain of connexion” was extraordinarily disconnected. He had drafted his tale in stages over many months, and his plans for the adventures of his hero had suffered a number of disrupting changes of direction.(1) But it was in the final flurries of composition that he most strikingly failed to bring to dénouement any one of several story lines which the narrated incidents forecast. These are the sections which extend from Chapter XVI through the final “Note,” and it is likely that they were composed between March and May 1838 with additions being made very close to publication time in July. Rigorous analysis of these chapters does indeed “open a wide field for speculation.” My own inferences are that three potential narrative lines were successively instituted for Pym's adventures; that the first was aborted by the second; that the second was superseded by the third; and that the third was [page 105:] purposely left open-ended for a desired final effect of mystification. Briefly stated, these three lines were: 1) an extended cruise through the South Pacific, to be climaxed by the destruction of the ship by hostile natives and the captivity of Pym and his fellow crew members; 2) a voyage through increasingly warm waters towards the South Pole, with scientific observation as the main concern; 3) a visit to a mysterious southern island and a subsequent journey to the Pole, with emphasis now shifted to some apocalyptic discovery about the origins and dispersion of the races of man. Let us now consider what evidence there is for each of these conjectured narrative lines.

1. The South Pacific Voyage. All foreshadowings of future action set forth in the “Preface” and in the first fifteen chapters suggest that Poe was relying heavily on plot materials which he had found in J.N. Reynolds’ Address on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition (New York, 1838) and possibly in Washington Irving's Astoria.(2) In several lengthy footnotes,(3) Reynolds relates the same basic story to appeal for governmental protection for Americans sailing in southern oceans. Fundamentally the narrative concerns an American vessel which is wrecked on a South Seas island; the crew, captured by bloodthirsty natives, suffer for long periods from unimaginable barbarities. Finally some effect an escape and bring home to their countrymen the urgent need for the safeguarding of sailors in these waters and the duty to seek out and rescue those left in bondage. As Reynolds comments, such accounts “present a thrilling picture of the vicissitudes to which the mariner is constantly exposed, and which appeal to government with a force beyond the power of all language to portray” (pp. 53-54). Such a tale Poe surely set out to tell. The very opening paragraphs of Pym inform us of Augustus’ travels in the South Pacific Ocean and of Pym's own strong “desire to go to sea.” A bit later Pym more specifically predicts what he will undergo: “My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown. ... I regarded them only as prophetic glimpses of a destiny which I felt myself in a measure bound to fulfill” (II, 1).(4) For a number of chapters this narrative line is consistently carried out. The Grampus is fitted out for a whaling voyage; Augustus and Pym's dog Tiger are established as actors destined to play important roles; there are references to the “nine long years” (X, 1) of Pym's adventuring; and there are unfulfilled promises of later discussions of tortoises and [page 106:] other South Seas fauna. Indeed, until the Grampus is reduced by storms to a hulk, even Dirk Peters and the other mutineers are bent on pursuing the original course for the South Pacific (V, 6). Poe's reading in collections of short voyage narratives,(5) however, at some point caused him to alter the plan of a single continuous journey. As most readers observe, he unaccountably gets rid of Augustus and Tiger, assigns a stronger role to Peters, and subtly increases the apparent age of Pym (who had been only fourteen in the first Southern Literary Messenger installment). Poe's discovery as a sourcebook of Capt. Benjamin Morrell's A Narrative of Four Voyages (New York, 1832) after he had completed Chapter XIII brought an invigorating boost to his faltering narrative, but the direction of the cruise was still into southern waters. Indeed, directly copying incidents from Captain Morrell's first and fourth voyages, Poe takes Pym and the Jane Guy on just such a cruise — but only into the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The opening sentence of Chapter XVI signals a sudden change in the planned plot line: “It had been Captain Guy's original intention ... to proceed through the Strait of Magellan, and up along the western coast of Patagonia.” But now, Pym tells us, the captain wants to turn southward to seek some islands and then “to push on towards the pole.” With this decision the idea of a Pacific voyage was permanently dropped, though some of the contemplated adventures may well have been transferred to the locale of Tsalal.

2. The Scientific Quest for the Pole. As my collaborator and I pointed out in an earlier article,(6) external events were no doubt responsible for Poe's shifting of narrative line at this point. Thus fare following the enthusiastic testimony of Reynolds and Morrell — he had been emphasizing the vast commercial potential of southern waters. But in March 1838 when he was still at work on the latter stages of the text of Pym, the long delayed United States South Seas exploring expedition (for which Reynolds had lobbied) was suddenly brought to life with the appointment of a new commander and the setting of a probable sailing date. The details of the announcement well fitted another sovereign concern of both Reynolds and Morrell: their desire that an American vessel be the first to attain the South Pole. Most of Chapter XVI of Pym is drawn in nearly verbatim detail from these two sources, and the narrative now moves into a headlong drive southward. Poe's tone in Chapters XVI and XVII is flatly factual and scientific, with one goal held before his reader — to solve “the great problem in regard to an Antarctic continent” (XVII, 12). And [page 107:] Pym himself ends Chapter XVII with some tantalizing bait: “I must still be allowed to feel some degree of gratification at having been instrumental, however remotely, in opening to the eye of science one of the most intensely exciting secrets which has ever engrossed its attention.”

What is this secret, never to be directly revealed to the reader of Pym? A plausible answer can be found not only in the hints which Poe gives in the text but also in other passages from his two chief sources, Reynolds and Morrell. In each authority the argument is essentially the same: all navigators have testified that large ice fields begin to vanish and the sea becomes warmer the farther south a ship sails. Moreover, there is little likelihood of a large intervening land mass. Reynolds is almost fanatical on the hope of discovery: “That the ninetieth degree, or the South Pole, may be reached by the navigator, is our deliberate opinion (unless intercepted by land), which all that we have seen and known has tended to confirm” (p. 97). Morrell, too, on the basis of his own personal experience, is equally explicit: “If there be no more land to the south than that with which we are already acquainted, the antarctic seas must be much less obstructed by ice than is generally supposed; and that a clear sea is open for voyages of discovery, even to the south pole” (p. 69). Pym's own confirmation of this supposition, then, would be a momentous scientific occasion, but it would be one which — granted the emphasis of the testimony which he quotes — the reader would hardly be unprepared for. This was the almost inevitable story: the Jane Guy, caught in a southerly current, would push its way through the last of the field ice, would encounter no further land, and would at last reach that spot which, as Morrell grandiloquently puts it, “is the ne plus ultra of latitude, where all the degrees of longitude are merged into a single point, and where the sun appears to revolve in a horizontal circle” (pp. 67-68). But, as Poe must have recognized, such a climax was not only somewhat anticlimactic; it might also shortly be forestalled in reality. As the concluding “Note” points out, “the statements of the author in relation to these regions may shortly be verified or contradicted by means of the governmental expedition now preparing for the Southern Ocean.” A more artistically satisfying — and less directly factual — conclusion had now to be found.

3. The Pole as Revelation. Though the promise of a scientific voyage of exploration is held out as late as Chapter XX, the pause at Tsalal led Poe on to a third and final narrative strand — the notion of the Pole [page 108:] as scene of some startling revelation about man's origins and dispersal. As noted above, the adventures on the island may possibly be a reworking of material originally scheduled for the Pacific cruise, since nearly all of Chapters XVIII through XXII are drawn in often precise detail from Captain Morrell's account of his near-fatal discovery of what he calls the “Massacre Islands.” The stimulus for Poe's departure from this stirring but factual story may have been Morrell's comments on the surprise of the black natives at the sight of his white crew. The Captain thus reports the reaction of the native king at their initial confrontation: “Having satisfied himself that I was constructed of bones and flesh, like his own race, and that the white paint could not be rubbed off my ebony skin, he turned to his chiefs and counsellors in great astonishment, and harangued them at some length, on so wonderful a phenomenon” (p. 397). Two questions are suggested here: how came such black races into such remote Pacific islands and why their astonishment at the sight of white men? Poe purposely clouds these issues to achieve mystification, but the testimony of his sources is clear enough. Describing his offering of food to the natives of a region at the tip of South America, Morrell speculates thus on their peopling from distant parts: “The pork they promptly rejected, and scarcely tasted of the bread. This circumstance might lend some support to an hypothesis lately advanced, and sustained with considerable ability, that the aborigines of America are descendants of the lost tribes of Israel” (p. 91).

This sort of explanation is frequent enough in Morrell's book to have stirred in Poe memories of his review of J.L. Stephens’ Arabia Petraea, which he had contributed to the New York Review for October 1837. This curious performance has as its avowed intent support for the literal interpretation of Biblical prophecies concerning the destruction or dispersal of ancient civilizations; and Poe here pointedly argues for the gradual unfolding of the meaning of apparently unintelligible utterances. Citing one such example, he comments portentously of its effect on the “philosophical thinker”:

In Chapter XXIV of Pym the past of the island of Tsalal is suddenly and inexplicably linked with those desolated areas of the Holy Land which Stephens and others had described:

But who had raised these “gigantic structures”? And what prophecy about Tsalal was to be revealed? Only a few other hints are given: the chasms and inscriptions, the carved figure which is pointing toward the south, the fear of the black natives of any thing white, and the curious appearance of the grayish vapor in the direction of the Pole. Though Sidney Kaplan and others have argued ingeniously that such black/white contrasts are basically a projection of Poe's own racist fantasies,(8) I cannot accept this limiting interpretation. For what is obscurely suggested is that Tsalal derived from an ancient civilization which dated back to the dispersion of tribes in Old Testament days. It is still ruled, along with neighboring islands, by a king called “Tsalemon” or ‘”Psalemoun,” though its people are now reduced to a degraded remnant. Who, then, were its original settlers? Morrell, I believe, supplies the missing information. Describing a visit to Patagonia, he comments:

It is now clear that Tsalal had undergone such a history. Both the prophetic inscriptions and Pym's final confrontation with a huge “shrouded human figure” suggest that the original settlers had moved on to Ultima Thule. In the eerie light of the conclusion, Pym presumably makes this discovery. But any direct revelation is, of course, denied [page 110:] to us. Just as Pym is about to turn in to his publishers the final chapters which will describe the encounter, he meets by accident the death which he had so narrowly escaped in his years of wandering. In a sense, Poe achieves his desired theatrical effect: Pym is last seen by the reader at the very climax of discovery. Only the anonymous “Note” remains to tease us with the mysteries of his knowledge and of his end.

And yet the “Note,” hoaxing in tone though it is, does tell us more than meets the average reader's eye. Poe himself urges further searching in the next-to-last sentence: “It is not impossible that ‘Tsalal,’ the appellation of the island of the chasms, may be found, upon minute philological scrutiny, to betray either some alliance with the chasms themselves, or some reference to the Ethiopian characters so mysteriously written in their windings.” To my knowledge, no commentator except Sidney Kaplan has paid much attention to the meanings of the ancient words which the learned “editor” so obfuscatingly explicates. Yet Kaplan does not go far enough in following up Poe's hint. According to the comparative alphabetical tables supplied in Poe's source, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament from the Latin of William Gesenius (Boston, 1836), the “Ethiopian” (actually Geéz) word may be transliterated as zalemana and the “Egyptian” (Coptic) as pathureis — i.e., Pathros, that region of Upper (Southern) Egypt mentioned in the Old Testament as a place where Hebrews lived. A “faintly detailed” story does then indeed emerge. In a series of chasms which spell out the root name of Tsalal and whose meaning is “to be shady” appears a crudely rendered human figure pointing to the south and to the words for “to be white” and “the region of the south.” Gigantic white ancients, then, following some prophecy, have gone on forever, leaving behind them a people destined to deteriorate, to become “shady,” and to fear whiteness. But, as Poe mockingly admits, “in no visible manner is this chain of connexion complete.”

Poe's final hoax in Pym is an ingenious yet highly obscure one; but again a search of his sources reveals its initial stimulus. In the appendixes to his Address, Reynolds reprints a number of letters sent to him from various specialists making suggestions for personnel to be included aboard the projected exploring expedition. In one of these Professor Charles Anthon — from whom Poe had derived information on a Hebrew prophetic passage for use in his review of Stephens — makes the significant prediction: [page 111:]

Other philologists who wrote to Reynolds were just as certain as to where such research would lead. John Pickering affirmed:

And, perhaps most pertinently, Josiah W. Gibbs pointed out the supreme value of the role of a philologist on an expedition to unknown regions.

Poe was not to bring to any such completion his own “important chapter in the history of our race.” Certainly it would have taken a philologist to work out fully the meanings of his ancient words. Yet enough is indeed “faintly detailed” to allow us to recover the ultimate revelation of Pym's missing manuscript. It was that man had already penetrated to the uttermost ends of the earth.

[page 111, continued:]

NOTES

1 For details see J. V. Ridgely and Iola S. Haverstick, “Chartless Voyage: The Many Narratives of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, VII (Spring 1966), 63-80. The present essay is an attempt to modify and extend some of the conclusions set forth in this earlier article. [page 112:]

2 Poe had reviewed both books in the Southern Literary Messenger, III (Jan. 1837), the same issue which contained the initial installment of Pym.

3 E.g., pp. 47-48, 54-60, 67-68; there are similar incidents given in the main body of the address. Further citations to Poe's source materials will be given in the text.

4 Since I find the text of the first edition of Pym (New York, 1838) integral to my argument, I have taken all my quotations from this source. To facilitate location of these quotations by readers not having access to the first edition, I have identified each by chapter and paragraph numbers.

5 Earlier source studies have named such works as The Mariner's Chronicle and Remarkable Events and Remarkable Shipwrecks. However, the basic narratives were reprinted in many other collections, any one of which Poe may have used.

6 Op. cit., p. 75.

7 James L. Harrison, ed., The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1902), X, 11.

8 See Kaplan's introduction to the Hill & Wang paperback edition of Pym (New York, 1960), reprinted with some additions in Robert Regan, ed., Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1967).