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PREFACE
From its inception Pym has provoked controversy. Although some critics have seen it sparkling with genius, most have found its style uneven and its structure imperfect. It has been called shocking — too factual in its horrible details of murder and cannibalism, and, on the other hand, too fantastic, indeed incredible and preposterous. It has been criticized for lack of character development and unity, its truncated ending particularly being attacked. Even those critics who see great merits in the tale begin by apologizing for its apparent defects. Indeed Poe himself, having become discouraged by its critical reception, declared his novel “a very silly book.”
Yet the great French poet Charles Baudelaire's admiration for Pym is attested by his having undertaken the task of translating so long a work. In a letter to the critic Saint-Beuve he declared there were “profundities” to be found in Poe's tale. And although Henry James, that consumate [[consummate]] artist of the word, blasted Pym in French Poets and Novelists in 1878, some twenty-five years later in The Golden Bowl he saw the novel as “a wonderful tale” that was a tribute to what the American imagination could do. When Walt Whitman dreamed a dream about Poe, the Poe who appeared to him was not the poet of “The Raven” but the poetic novelist of Pym. Whitman wrote:
I saw a vessel on the sea, at midnight, in a storm. It was no great full-rigg’d ship, nor majestic steamer, steering firmly through the gale, but seem’d one of those superb little schooner yachts I had often seen lying anchor’d, rocking so jauntily, in the waters around New York, or up Long Island sound — now flying uncontroll’d with torn sails and broken spars through the wild sleet and winds and waves of the night. On the deck was a slender, slight, beautiful figure, a dim man, apparently enjoying all the terror, the murk, and the dislocation of which he was the centre and the victim. That figure of my lurid dream might stand for Edgar Poe, his spirit, his fortunes, and his poems — themselves [[all]] lurid dreams.
I think Whitman's judgment accurate here, for in Pym we have the essentials of all the variety of Poe's genius. As Vincent Buranelli has observed: “Poe put into his longest piece of fiction a bit of everything at his command — fact, hoax, burlesque, horror, fantasy, psychology, and symbolism. ...” He might have added irony, philosophy, and poetry. All this variety does not, as Buranelli suggests, amount “to a hodgepodge with flashes of genius” which falls to produce a unity of effect. Nor did Poe over-reach himself or misjudge his vocation when he wrote his novel. Although his hand may not have been as sure as when he wrote his great Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, his imagination was as profound. It is a great psychological novel. Furthermore, as a sea story its descendant is Moby-Dick, one of the greatest novels of world literature. Pym explores the 1ife of consciousness and self-identity, takes one on a schizophrenic journey of the mind, and probes into the meaning of 1ife and death, into the nature of self and reality. However it is truly symbolic and not allegorical; no critic should expect a consistent pattern of one-to-one correspondences; and ultimately its symbolism is too overwhelming to be expressed in words that carry a single meaning. Its final passage is as poetic as the conclusion of James Joyce's great [page 6:] story “The Dead.”
I hope the following studies will advance our understanding and appreciation of a novel that has too long suffered critical contempt and disparagment [[disparagement]] and consequent neglect. We ought now be sophisticated enough about the nature and quality of Poe's art to take an opposite tack.
Richard P. Benton
Hartford, Connecticut 1977
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - ATQ78, 1975] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Studies in Poe's Pym (Richard P. Benton) (Preface)