Text: Alexander Hammond, “The Composition of The Narrative of A. G .Pym: Notes Toward a Re-Examination,” Studies in Poe's Pym (1975), pp. 9-20 (This material is protected by copyright)

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In their 1966 article “Chartless Voyage: The Many Narratives of Arthur Gordon Pym,” J. V. Ridgely and Iola S. Haverstick offer an impressively thorough survey of the publication data, revisions, sources, and internal discrepancies of Poe's 1838 novel, arguing that the “only ex-planation which will account for this unusually flawed text is that Poe worked on it at several periods between the end of 1836 and the early summer of 1838, that he changed his mind several times about the direction of his story line, and that he made a hurried but inefficient attempt to turn his disconnected narrative into a whole at the very moment when the volume was being put to press.”(1) The body of the article elaborates on this view by identifying five stages in the composition of Pym: “1) the Southern Literary Messenger text, composed in late 1836 and published in the January and February, 1837, issues; 2) the material following the end of the Messenger segment up through the close of Chapter IX, written in April-May, 1837; 3) Chapters X through XV, put together probably in late 1837 and early 1838; 4) Chapter XVI to the conclusion, with the omission of Chapter XXIII and the final ‘Note,’ composed between March and May, 1838; and 5) Chapter XXIII and the ‘Note,’ added to the text in July, 1838” (p. 64). The article concludes from its data that Pym is “not a problem for serious explication” (p. 80), an inference challenged by subsequent commentators including Professor Ridgely himself in two later essays,(2) but the above time sequence for the novel's composition, partially conjectural as the authors are careful to acknowledge, has been widely accepted as accurate and essentially factual.(3) An examination of the 10 June 1837 copyright entry for Pym convinces me, however, that the inferential dating of the last three stages in this sequence must be seriously questioned.

Controlling much of this aspect of Ridgely and Haverstick's argument is their assumption that Poe failed to supply his publishers with a completed manuscript in the late spring of 1837 when Pym was advertised among books “nearly ready for publication” and its title registered for copyright, for otherwise “the Harpers would have published the book they had announced” (pp. 68, 70-71). In their hypothesis, such “dilatory conduct” (p. 79) continues for almost a year after Poe's “failing the publishers” (p. 72) and helps explain the unspecified complaints the Harpers still nursed against Poe when he approached them with another project in 1844.(4) But in order to [page 10:] explain the conduct itself, the authors must offer us the rather implausible image of an ex-editor of a monthly literary journal who cannot write to a deadline and who did not bother to iron out signs of sloppy composition in a manuscript written over a period of at least one-and-a-half years when the known demands on his pen were very few. Indeed, Ridgely and Haverstick's generally convincing demonstration that the stages in Pym's genesis leave all too obvious traces in its finished text makes a prima facie case for a hasty process of composition over a much briefer period than they hypothesize. The authors are not, of course, blind to this point; consistent with their “certainty ... that the Harpers did not have enough copy to publish when they expected to (and did not have for more than a year to come),” they speculate that Poe must have worked on the project by fits and starts, dropping it for long periods while “waiting for some new controlling idea” (pp. 71-72, 75).

Working out the logic of their basic assumption, the authors attempt to establish how much of the manuscript Poe might have completed by June of 1837: in their view, very little indeed — the Messenger sections plus the preface and other added material through approximately Chapter IX. A second premise is important to their argument here. They feel that Poe's decision to direct Pym's wandering voyage toward the South Pole, and thus the composition of all the material from Chapter XVI through the concluding “Note,” “may be linked with some certainty” to external events beginning in March 1838, when “the bogged-down South Seas expedition [charged, among other things, with exploring the Antarctic] was given new impetus with the appointment of Lieutenant Charles Wilkes as its commander” (p. 75). Although ample evidence connects the composition and publication of Pym to this expedition, the inference drawn here is, as will be seen, by no means a necessary one. Reasoning from these assumptions obligates the authors to explain away obvious foreshadowings of the Antarctic voyage and Tsalalian episodes in the preface and Chapter IV as 1838 interpolations into material they otherwise date as composed in the spring of 1837 (pp. 70 and 77, fn.29). Most significantly, these same assumptions prompt what I consider a misinterpretation of the novel's copyright entry, which otherwise indicates that Pym was essentially complete when its elaborate title was recorded on 10 June 1837.

I can most efficiently deal with the copyright entry, reproduced on the following page, by quoting the two paragraphs Ridgely and Haverstick devote to describing and analyzing the document; their footnotes are placed in the text in square brackets and their italics are retained:

The opening of the second paragraph above alludes to evidence the authors present later in the article indicating the publishers did not begin setting Pym in type before May 1838: “The first leaf of the book is an advertisement dated May, 1838, listing Pym among works ‘just published.’ This leaf is integral with signature [A] of the text — that is, it is not tipped in or bound into the book but was set up along with the opening pages of the story” (p. 77, fn. 31), which include, of course, the title page. In their interpretation of this fact and of the correspondence between the paragraphing of the printed title page and the copyright entry, Ridgely and Haverstick once again depend on the assumption that the Harpers would put Pym to press as soon as they had sufficient manuscript, which by hypothesis did not occur before the spring of 1838. But their reasoning ignores an obvious alternative: the publishers themselves may have been responsible for the delay in the printing and issuing of the work. The investigators accordingly fail to explore the possibility that Pym may have been essentially complete in June 1837 and that the copyright entry may simply reflect the wording and paragraphing Poe and the firm had decided upon at the time for its title page, however long the delay before the manuscript itself was put to press. Furthermore, Ridgely and Haverstick's thesis seems to have colored their examination of the copyright entry proper, for that document actually negates their interpretation of the clerk's treatment of [page 13:] Pym's lengthy title.

Their description of the entry is admirably precise, but one must quarrel with the contention that there is “underwriting” beneath the canceled lines: if a palimpsest exists, the previous text is not readily observable. To my unaided eye, the passage appears to have been struck out by a clerk who either grew frustrated by its sloppy inking or accidentally copied the same paragraph twice, the latter the more probable alternative. Their analysis tends to de-emphasize the minor variations between the entry and the 1838 title page (reproduced on p. 11), variations which suggest to me that the clerk was not copying the subtitle from the text of the printed novel deposited by Harpers. Unlike the copyright entry, for example, the printed title is all in large and small capitals, although the clerk might understandably not try to duplicate this feature. But the entry also fails to record the comma after “CAPTURE” in the second paragraph of the 1838 subtitle. In reference to this same paragraph, the entry gives “Survivors” for the printed “SURVIVERS” in addition to “Antartic” for “ANTARCTIC.” And for the penultimate lines of the subtitle, the entry records commas (or periods) after the words “Discoveries” and “South” where the printed text has no punctuation whatsoever. More significantly, Ridgely and Haverstick's analysis ignores the contrasting inks present on the entry form.

When recording the date of entry, the publishers’ name, the main title, and the entire sub-title, the clerk used an ink with a consistent, light-brown tint (the cancelation, done with very heavy strokes, was probably but not certainly made with this same ink); to all appearances, the entry seems the integral product of one sitting by the clerk. Furthermore, when noting in the left margin that the published book was “Deposited August 1, 1838,” the clerk used an ink with a distinctly black hue, quite unlike that of the subtitle Ridgely and Haverstick claim he added at this time. Other entries in the volume confirm that this discrepancy is not an accident of chemistry or a matter of the clerk using multiple ink bottles on the same day. The Harpers registered three additional titles on 10 June 1837 (one of which, Pelayo: A Story of the Goth, was not deposited until 10 December 1838, suggesting that the long delay in the publication of Pym may not be quite so unusual as Ridgely and Haverstick imply); all three are recorded in the same hand and with the same light-brown ink featured in the entry for Pym. Because a glance at the forms this same clerk actually did fill out at the time Pym was deposited reveals him exclusively using the darker ink of the marginal notation to register titles on 31 July and 1 August 1838,(5) we can conclude that he labored only one day, and that 10 June 1837, in making the entry for both Pym's title and subtitle.

The implications of establishing this date are several. Most simply, it suggests that the announcement in the May 1837 Knickerbocker of Pym among Harpers’ works “nearly ready for publication” [page 14:] was a statement of fact. Little time, I should stress, need have elapsed between the publishers’ release of this information and 10 June, for the notice was printed at the end of the journal's May issue, which itself “was issued at a late period of the month.”(6) There remains, of course, a possibility that the title registered for copyright did not constitute a table of contents for a finished manuscript but rather an outline for a book fully planned but not yet completed. Ridgely and Haverstick's findings, reinforced by later work on Poe's use of his sources,(7) argue against such an hypothesis: however much generalized planning Poe may have done for Pym's journey, the contents of sequential stages in the book seem clearly dependent on the particular sources he used at the time of their composition (most of the work's inconsistencies arise from this procedure). Given these findings, I find it improbable that the title could have been composed before the manuscript was in roughly its published form. I would propose, therefore, that after convincing the Harpers to consider a work already partially in print, Poe did manage in those first few months in New York to finish those portions of its final text still unwritten when Thomas W. White stopped the Messenger's serialization of the original “Arthur Gordon Pym” with the February 1837 installment.(8)

Such a time span, as noted before, seems consistent with evidence of hasty composition in the text. Furthermore, it agrees with the few contemporary reports we have for dating the actual labor of composition. Writing from New York on 28 February 1837, Poe replied to a request for a contribution to The Baltimore Book, “I would be quite willing to forward an article by the 1st April if so late a period would answer. I am afraid my other engagements would not admit of my sending anything at an earlier date,” suggesting that perhaps a commitment to complete Pym was already among his “engagements” by this time.(9) And William Gowans, who lived in the same house with Poe for eight months after the latter's 1837 move to New York, recalled, “During this time he wrote his longest prose romance, entitled the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym.”(10) Most significantly, this dating of Pym's composition links the writing of its final stages to the period in which Poe was carefully reading, and researching issues raised by J. L. Stephens’ Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petræa, and the Holy Land, a Harpers’ publication known to be an important source behind the Biblical and philological dimensions of the Tsalalian episodes and the final “Note.”(11)

Poe's long review of Arabia Petræa was not printed until October 1837, but we know that by 27 May he had read the book and was sufficiently involved in preparation of the essay to request a translation from Charles Anthon, another Harpers author, of Biblical passages central to his argument.(12) Poe evidently worked from advance proof sheets (a puff of Stephens’ book in the May 1837 Knickerbocker observes that its “volumes are not yet published”)(13) and intended his essay for the second number of the quarterly New York Review. Its first issue appeared in March; the second number's deadline must therefore have been early summer, but a change of publisher delayed its [page 15:] appearance until the following fall.(14) An allusion to this fact in Poe's review supports dating its initial composition in late spring; the delay, he implies, led him to revise an earlier version of the published essay: “In an article prepared for this journal some months ago, we had traced the route of Mr. Stephens with a degree of minuteness not desirable now, when the work has been so long in the hands of the public” (Works, X, 3). Thus the hypothesis that Poe completed Pym in the late spring of 1837 reasonably accounts for the echoes of Stephens’ book in the novel's final stages as well as for the parallel concerns with prophecy, sacred texts, and hermeneutics in these stages and in the author's New York Review essay.

This admittedly tentative outline suggests that a plausible case exists for interpreting the registration of Pym's title for copyright as indication that the publishers had received a completed manuscript. A re-examination of Pym's composition must, of course, also address the issue of its delayed publication. In reference to an earlier version of this article, Professor Burton R. Pollin pointed out that the Panic of 1837, which sharply affected the Harpers’ financing in mid-May of that year, must be considered as a factor here. In The Brothers Harper, Eugene Exman observes that financial pressure forced the publishers to cut back on new acceptances and post-pone printing manuscripts on hand, including, he feels, Poe's novel (Exman notes that Catherine Sedgwick's Live and Let Live, which was registered for copyright on the same day as Pym, evidently “could not be put off,” for it “was issued in early summer”).(15) Ridgely and Haverstick's findings suggest, however, that the publishers’ timing of Pym's release must also be included in an evaluation of their decision to delay; on that basis, the conclusion to these notes briefly proposes a model different from Exman's for Harpers’ handling of Poe's manuscript.(16)

Ridgely and Haverstick develop evidence linking the dates of Pym's printing and publication to the departure of the United States Exploring Expedition bound for the Antarctic, suggesting that the Harpers urged Poe in the spring of 1838 to complete his manuscript rapidly so that they could take advantage of “current excitement” about that event (pp. 77-78). But this controversial expedition had been a center of public attention and debate since 1836. If the Harpers had accepted Poe's book with the intention of timing its release to coincide with the fleet's departure, then the expedition's much discussed difficulties with personnel, equipment, and organization during the summer and fall of 1837, leading to repeated postponements of its sailing date and near collapse of the enterprise in the winter of 1837-38, offers a quite adequate explanation for the decision to hold off setting Pym in type until the spring of 1838, when the chances that the expedition would finally sail in the summer, under a new commander and with a largely different fleet of ships, were fairly certain.(17)

There can be little doubt that Pym self-consciously exploits interest in this expedition: [page 16:] as Ridgely and Haverstick note, its title page explicitly calls attention to the Antarctic I Ocean by referring to events on islands in the “EIGHTY-FOURTH PARALLEL OF SOUTHERN LATITUDE” and “STILL FARTHER SOUTH”; the preface begins with an allusion to an “extraordinary series of adventures in the South Seas and elsewhere”(18) and reports that “Mr. Poe” was most interested in the portions of Pym's story “related to the Antarctic Ocean”; the foreshadowings of wonders to! the South in the narrative proper (see, for example, Works, III, 53, 109, 171, 178, 187) continue the implication of title page and preface that Pym's voyage has scooped the exploring expedition; Chapter XVI, of course, is given up to paraphrased accounts of Antarctic exploration; and the final “Note” refers explicitly to the expedition itself — ”The loss of two or three final chapters ... is the more deeply to be regretted, as, it cannot be doubted, they contained matter relative to the Pole itself, or at least to regions in its very near proximity; and as, too, 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” (Works, III, 243).

It is crucial to understand that these allusions make as much sense in the late spring of 1837 (when, I should stress again, Pym's title was written) as they do in the summer of 1838. In his second review concerning this expedition, published in the Messenger for January 1837, Poe observed, “In regard to the time of sailing there can be but little choice — the vessels will put to sea as soon as everything is ready. The scientific corps, we believe, is not yet entirely filled up; nor can it be well organized until the preparations in the frigate [Macedonian, flagship of the fleet,] are completed.”(19) Poe's information here was a bit dated, for the frigate had been launched 2 November 1836, and in January it and the other ships in the expedition were on their way to rendezvous in Norfolk. Throughout the spring of 1837 the news was filled with reports of the preparation and testing of these ships, several of which were proving to be poor sailors. During this phase of the expedition's preparations — under the command of Captain Thomas ap Catesby Jones, who would resign his post in ill health and disgust the following December-neither Poe nor his publishers could have predicted the many months that would elapse before the fleet actually sailed. It seems probable, then, that the Harpers had accepted Pym on the basis “ of its topical appeal, that the work was written, at least in part, specifically to exploit a timely market, and that its composition was rushed during the spring of 1837 so that the publishers would have a manuscript ready for press when the expedition's uncertain departure date ‘ finally became firm. Furthermore, the inconsistencies in the 1838 edition imply, given this hypothesis, that Poe chose not to revise his manuscript during the period of waiting for this departure; the publishers could well have had possession of the manuscript throughout this time and thus have been responsible for the only element in the published text necessarily added after [page 17:] 10 June 1837 — the date “July, 1838” at the end of the preface.(20)

Finally, and most speculatively, this hypothesis suggests a way of reconciling the composition of this novel, clearly a patchwork affair in spite of the work's orderly symmetries, with modern readings of its text. Pym's title page and the timing of its release suggest the publishers saw this book as essentially a hoax on Antarctic exploration. If Poe did persuade the Harpers that he could develop his aborted Messenger serial into a convincing hoax playing upon the excitement generated by the expedition, it would help explain why they accepted the project in the first place after warning him in 1836 that republished material from magazines was very difficult to sell.(21) It might also explain the publishers’ unspecified 1844 complaints against Poe, if they indeed had reference to Pym, for the book obviously grew increasingly implausible during composition (it was widely reviewed as a fiction whose insistent claims to veracity were at best transparent artifice, at worst humbuggery).(22) Recent critical readings of Pym as a self-referential novel ironically concerned with illusion and fiction-making(23) are, I think, essentially consistent with this view of the book's genesis.

In the process of composing a hoax using the techniques of verisimilitude (and the methods of a hack writer), Poe evidently turned his attention back upon the issues of audience manipulation, mimesis, and interpretation of illusion and language implicit in the task itself, consequently producing not a travel-book hoax like Jane Porter's dull if relatively convincing Sir Edward Seaward's Narrative (1831) but rather an ironically transparent, self-referential imitation of ate such a work that takes its ostensible form as a thematic concern. The seeds for this development were already inherent, I think, in the masquerade motif and the scene of Pym's encounter with [1] Augustus’ note in the Messenger sections of the story, and Poe's own encounter with the problems of Biblical hermeneutics in preparing his review of Arabia Petræa could only have reinforced this direction in the book's growth. Poe was, I suspect, constitutionally unable to do the straight-forward hackwork that Harpers’ other travel-book writers seemed to perform with relative ease.(24) He apparently committed himself to a task requiring such labor early in 1837, but the result was hardly straightforward: it might best be described, to paraphrase John Barth, as a novel that imitates a fraudulent travel-book, written by an author who imitates a literary hack.

Washington State University

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Notes

I should like to thank Mr. Peter Van Wingen of the Rare Book Division, Library of Congress, for his aid in the examination and photoduplication of the copyright records cited in this article.

1 Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 8 (1966), 63; future citations to this article are made parenthetically in text.

2 “The End of Pym and the Ending of Pym,” in Papers on Poe: Essays in Honor of John Ward Ostrom, ed. Richard p. Veler (Springfield, Ohio: Chantry Music Press, 1972), pp. 104-112; Tragical-Mythical-Satirical-Hoaxical: Problems of Genre in Pym,” American Transcendental Quarterly, No. 24, Part I (Fall 1974), 4-9.

3 For example, see Grace Farrell Lee, “The Quest of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Southern Literary Journal, 4 (1972), 23; Paul John Eakin, “Poe's Sense of an Ending,” American Literature, 45 (1973), 16; Daniel J. Tynan, “J. N. Reynolds’ Voyage of the Potomac: Another Source for ... Pym,” Poe Studies, 4 (1971), 35; and Burton R. Pollin, “The Narrative of Benjamin Morrell: Out of ‘The Bucket’ and into Poe's Pym,” Studies in American Fiction, 4 (1976), 158.

4 Ridgely and Haverstick, p. 79; see also Anthon to Poe, 2 November 1844, in Arthur H. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1941), p. 427. Professor Burton R. Pollin has pointed out to me that Mary E. Phillips, Edgar Allan Poe, the Man (Philadelphia, 1926), II, 881-882, interprets Anthon's 1844 remark to Poe concerning the Harpers — ”They have complaints against you, grounded on certain movements of yours, when they acted as your publishers some years ago” — as referring not to Pym per se but rather to Poe's role in the publication of The Conchologist's First Book (1839), a Harpers’ book he helped rework for another press to bring out in a cheap edition. Both readings seem equally possible to me. As these notes will indicate, I am indebted throughout this article to Professor Pollin, who generously provided a critique of its earliest version amidst preparations for an imminent departure for Europe.

5 Copyright Records, New York South District, October 1836-December 1838, pp. 439-440. After learning that this essay was accepted for publication, Professor Ridgely kindly provided me with the 1976 notes he made on the copyright entry toward a follow-up study to “Chartless Voyage”; in them he recognizes the problem raised by the inks for that article's interpretation of this document as well as the need to consider the Harpers’ financial situation in judging the delay in Pym's publication. I am indebted to these notes for a distinction between the clerk's hand in the main entry and that of Fred J. Betts, who signed the form; since “Chartless Voyage” did not make this distinction, and since it did not affect my argument, I have not insisted upon it in my text.

6 Knickerbocker, 9 (June 1837), 632.

7 See Pollin, “The Narrative of Benjamin Morrell,” particularly pp. 164-165.

8 Ridgely and Haverstick, pp. 65-67, 71-72, argue that the Messenger installments included all of Pym that Poe had written before his move to New York. This inference should be partially qualified, in my opinion, for the material through Chapter V must have been at least thoroughly planned if not actually written during the Messenger period. Chapter V completes the story begun in Chapter IV of Augustus’ trials during Pym's entrapment in the hold. These characters occupy mirror-image environments, for chaos in the Grampus’ hold and chaos topside proceed in lock-step. Poe neatly folds the twin recitations of these events back upon themselves, with Pym's efforts to reach Augustus and read his message paralleling Augustus’ efforts to communicate with and rescue Pym. Clearly this design is both implicitly and explicitly at work in the Messenger sections, which break off just after Augustus begins his side of the story.

9 The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom, rev. ed. (New York: The Gordian Press, 1966), I, 111.

10 Quoted in Quinn, p. 267. Professor Pollin informs me that Gowan's testimony here cannot be definitely dated.

11 See Hervey Allen, Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe, 2nd. ed. (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1934), p. 338; analyses of Poe's use of this source include Sidney Kaplan, “Introduction,” The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), pp. vii-xxv; Ridgely, “The End of Pym and the Ending of Pym”; and Richard Wilbur, “Introduction,” The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (Boston: Godine, 1973), pp. vii-xxv. [page 19:]

12 Anthon to Poe, 1 June 1837, in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (1902; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1965), XVII, 42-43 — hereafter cited as Works. Compare this letter with “Review of Stephens’ Arabia Petræa,” Works, X, 1-25, particularly 14-19.

13 Knickerbocker, 9 (May 1837), 520; Eugene Exman, The Brothers Harper (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 95, claims Knickerbocker based its notice on early proofs.

14 See “Literary Record,” Knickerbocker, 10 (August 1837), 184; publication data for the Review are recorded in Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines: 1741-1850 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938), p. 669.

15 The Brothers Harper, ch. VII, “The Depression Years,” particularly pp. 95-97.

16 This model does not consider what I see as the unlikely possibility that the delay resulted from Poe's failure to supply the publishers with the adventures to the south of Tsalal promised in the last lines of the title page but obviously not present in the published novel. Such an hypothesis literalistically equates Pym's narrative with the novel as a whole and assumes, as Ridgely and Haverstick do in “Chartless Voyage,” pp. 77-79, that the work is indeed incomplete, the “Note” being simply a strategy to explain away the author's failure to meet his deadlines and finish the remainder of his story. In accord with Ridgely's “The End of Pym and the Ending of Pym,” I see the “Note” as integral to Poe's treatment of the Tsalalian episodes, the composition of which, as I have indicated, can be reasonably dated during the spring of 1837. The title page and the foreshadowings of discoveries near the South Pole within Pym's narrative are fully in keeping with the patterns of deception and inversion in the book as a whole, the ending of which appears deliberately designed to frustrate the very expectations for closure raised by these references. Insofar as Poe evidently had over a year in which to change his strategy for the ending of this novel, it seems reasonable to contend that the published conclusion represents his intentions rather than the exigencies of publication.

17 Information concerning the expedition is drawn from William Stanton, The Great United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1844 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), chs. 2 and 3. (An overview of news reports concerning the preparations may be obtained by following items indexed under “Exploring Expedition” in the Niles Weekly Register, 5th series, vols. I and II.) Briefer discussions of the expedition's preparations, with rather less dependable interpretations of the causes for its delay, are Edouard A. Stackpole, The Sea Hunters: New England Whalemen During Two Centuries 1635-1835 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953),pp.461-467; Philip I. Mitterling, America in the Antarctic to 1840 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1959), pp. 82-129; and David B. Tyler, The Wilkes Expedition: The First United States Exploring Expedition (1838-1842) (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1968), pp. 1-27.

18 Works, III, 3; Ridgely and Haverstick suggest this phrase indicates an original, non-polar destination for Pym's journey, since the term “South Seas” generally refers “to the South Pacific-which Pym never enters” (p. 70). While Poe had very probably not yet planned a particular route for his voyagers when the preface was written, the phrase can obviously still function as an allusion to the “South Seas Exploring Expedition,” as the project was generally called at the time (surveying the South Pacific was, of course, one of its goals). Furthermore, the North American Review, 45 (October 1837), 376, testifies to a contemporary tendency to equate “South Seas” with the “Antarctic Circle.”

19 Review of Reynold's Address, Works, IX, 313; for earlier notice, see “South-Sea Expedition,” Southern Literary Messenger, 2 (August, 1836), 586-589.

20 Ridgely and Haverstick, pp. 69-70, note internal discrepancies created by this date; whoever added it obviously did not bother to make changes in the preface consistent with the emendation.

21 Harpers to Poe, June 1836, in Quinn, pp. 250-251.

22 See the American reviews gathered and analyzed in Burton R. Pollin, “Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and the Contemporary Reviewers,” Studies in American Fiction, 2 (1974), 37-56, and “Three More Early Notices of Pym and the Snowden Connection,” Poe Studies, 8 (1975), 32-35.

23 Patrick F. Quinn's reading in The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957), pp. 169-215, is basic to all later studies of patterns of deception and masquerade in Pym. For studies that emphasize self-referential aspects of Pym, see Evelyn J. Hinz, [page 20:] “‘Tekeli-1i’: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as Satire,” Genre, 3 (1970), 379-399; Joseph J. Moldenhauer, “Imagination and Perversity in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 13 (1971), 267-280; Jean Ricardou, “Le Caractére singulier de cette eau,” trans. as “ ‘The Singular Character of the Water’ ” by Frank Towne, Poe Studies, 9 (1976), 16; Claude Richard, “L'Ecriture d'Arthur Gordon Pym,” Delta, 1 (1975), 95-124; and J. Gerald Kennedy “‘The Infernal Twoness’ in Arthur Gordon Pym,” Topic: 30, A Journal of the Liberal Arts, 16 (1976), 41-53.

24 See The Brothers Harper, pp. 94-95, for a description of Stephens’ composition of Arabia Petræa, and Pollin, “The Narrative of Benjamin Morrell,” for an expansion of Exman's account of the Harpers’ production of travel books by Morrell and his wife.