Text: Barton Levi St. Armand, “The Dragon and the Uroboros: Themes of Metamorphosis in Arthur Gordon Pym,” Studies in Poe's Pym (1975), pp. 57-71 (This material is protected by copyright)

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The fact that Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is a work of archetypal rhythms and cycles, involving complex patterns of death and rebirth, descent and ascent, experience and innocence, has been strongly substantiated by its modern critics.(1) Rather than improve on the attempts to make out of Poe's art either a rational structure or an irrational “chartless voyage,” I should 1ike to concentrate instead on the repetition of certain potent images which, in my view, form a matrix of their own.(2) Even if Poe's Narrative is a conscious hoax, I would risk shocking the bourgeoisie of much modern Poe scholarship by asserting the Jungian doctrine that archetypal patterns can flourish in deliria and delusions, in hyperbole, cheats, and deceptions, as well as in the unequivocal literature of high seriousness. Indeed, if Poe is out to deceive us in Pym, he may reveal more of the archetypal through the very expansiveness of his bantering play of mind than through the preconceived effects of his more carefully contrived fictions.

Thus, although I would not wish to push the point, the many meanderings, reversals of fortune, plunges into the ocean, transformations of character, changes of circumstances, horrifying dissolutions, and startling survivals that set the Narrative apart from ordinary fictions forcibly remind me of the equally complex and mystifying stages of alchemical transmutations. Mortification, calcination, sublimation, solution, separation, purgation, putrefaction, fermentation, ablution, conjunction, albification, and projection would seem to be as much a part of Pym's fate as they are of the prima materia isolated in the alchemical vessels of a Michael Maier or a George Ripley. I have stressed Poe's actual knowledge of the perennial philosophy of alchemy in some previous work,(3) but here I would simply like to adopt two convenient alchemical symbols, the Dragon and the Uroboros, as a means of exploring imagistic clusters that appear to define two opposite poles of archetypal metamorphosis in Poe's art.

Indeed, after Ovid and before Kafka, Poe could have with some justice subtitled his Narrative either the Metamorphoses or “Metamorphosis,” since these two terms help to define the actual nature of change in his work. Things can mutate in a fluid, on-going, kinetic way (Ovidian Metamorphoses), so that the subject passes through many stages toward one ultimate stage of the reconciliation of opposites.(4) The type of this change is the age-old symbol for eternity, the Uroboros, [page 58:] which Poe would have known from his familiarity with Shelley's poetry as well as from his dabbling in occult lore.(5) The snake swallowing its own tail, forming a perfect circle in the process, is an ancient device (see Fig.1) and, in his burlesque piece entitled “X-ing a Paragrab,” Poe specifically refers to the circle (in this case, the letter “o”) as an “Emblem of eternity.”(6) The opposite of the Uroboros is a case of arrested development (Kafkaesque “Metamorphosis”), something not fully transformed but painfully incomplete, unnatural, monstrous. In the alchemical myth, Mercurius, the hierophant who conducts the Mysteries of transmutation and who is also the presiding genius of the rites, goes through all of the stages of the work itself. Depending upon the hierarchical level at which one contemplates Mercurius, he can be seen either as the Uroboros of Divine Hermaphrodite, uniting contrary natures in a perfect whole, or as a monster, stuccoed over with the states of being he has contained but not yet fully transcended. In this latter static manifestation, he appears as the “Mercurius of the Philosophers” (see Fig.2) or the earth-bound Dragon (see Fig.3).

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In considering Mercurius as Monster, we return to the original meaning of the idea of the = grotesque, which is also a case of unnatural conjunction, of unassimilated natures. The stodgy first-century Roman architect Vitruvius conveyed a Classical reaction against such excesses when he condemned those fanciful designs which, unearthed fifteen-hundred years later, were to become the basis for the “grotesque” or “grottoesque” style revived by Raphael and others. Poe himself was to appropriate the term for one class of his tales,(7) and its derivation from grotta, “cave,” underscores his own fictional preoccupation with premature burials, subterranean vaults, and inquisitorial dungeons. “All those motifs which are based on reality,” Vitruvius thunders,

Such things do exist, indeed over-populate, the world of Arthur Gordon Pym, which is also a world of continual change replete with examples of arrested development, hermaphroditic monstrosities, and hybrid grotesques. The Narrative itself is a monstrous tale, and critics can be excused for reacting to it in the same manner that Vitruvius reacted to the skewed interior decoration of his time. Yet, once again, the perception of the meaning of such conjunctions of the ordinary with the extraordinary, the tedious with the disgusting, and the trivial with the horrible, depends ultimately on the angle of vision taken. This is the chief case I want to make about the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym: that its meaning heavily depends upon individual point of view. Long ago, Richard Wilbur demonstrated that the events which take place in “The Fall of the House of Usher” are tragic and unnatural, perhaps even pathetic, for the narrator of that tale, but, from Roderick Usher's unique perspective, they constitute a release a sublime escape, a transcendent apotheosis.(9) Pym is perverse enough without adopting a needlessly contrary reading to justify its abrupt and deliberately obscure ending, but I would maintain that the Narrative's monstrosity is functional when seen as an integral part of the theme of metamorphosis which rules the work.

To invoke Durkheim's popular categories and reiterate my argument, metamorphosis in Poe's Narrative is of two kinds: sacred and profane, general and particular, cosmic and quotidian, sublime and grotesque, Uroboric and Draconic. From a “sacred” perspective, the monstrosities and grotesqueries which plague Pym's career are parts of a larger whole, stages in a sublime and mythic journey. As in alchemy, which symbolizes its mysteries by a calculus often obscene, pornographic, or repellent to the ordinary consciousness, things are not what they seem. In alchemy, the brother copulates with the sister; the father eats the son; the corpse rots, putrefies, and [page 61:] is pecked by ravens; the crystalline water of life is obtained by the necessary nastiness of urination. These are all allegories of the larger, higher, and more inclusive ritual of transcendence, rungs on-a ladder by which the ultimate state of all-in-one and one-in-all is reached. This state is the plateau of the Uroboros, which Stanislas Klossowski de Rola has called “the eloquent symbol of the Infinite Eternal One, which represents perfectly the Great Cycle of the “ universe, as well as the Great Work which reflects it: perfect stillness and perfect motion.”(10) “Perfect stillness and perfect motion” — de Rola's words echo Eliot's similar transcendent overview of existence in The Four Quartets, where, as with the Uroboros, ends are in beginnings and beginnings are in ends:

“Do not call it fixity,” Eliot warns, and we can hope that it is this still point which Arthur Gordon Pym beholds after he has plummeted down the cataract where the great white figure looms . at the end of his Narrative. But Pym's real tragedy is that if he is in fact a hero, a questor, a knight errant, he has no more idea of the grail he seeks or the significance of the quest he undertakes or the meaning of the ritual he witnesses than does the narrator of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Rather, to quote Emerson's “Uriel,” Arthur Gordon Pym is (because of his truly abysmal ignorance),

Pym is a bumbling, blind Siegfried, a naive Jason, an uncunning and even stupid Ulysses. This paradoxically makes Pym a very modern kind of hero, an unwilling and accidental one who, if he attains awareness, escapes scorched rather than sainted. Pym endures rather than prevails, and one can only suspect that in the brief interval that Poe allows him after he has recorded these histoires extraordinaires, Arthur Gordon at least has enough of Hemingway's sense not to fish the swamp. This would contrast with Pym's earlier bumptious confession that:

Pym's visions are more than fulfilled, and his desires more than satiated, by the procession of monstrosities that are soon to pass before his eyes, like the fantastic figures on ny, antique maps which imaginative cartographers employed to disguise their ignorance of a terra incognita. Pym's world is ostensibly a world of metamorphosis, where one thing partakes of part [page 62:] of another thing, leading to the continual creation of anomalies and mutations. This is reflected in the names of the very vessels which figure consecutively in the Narrative. Pym's sailboat, the unseaworthy Ariel, is run down by the Penguin, a whaler bound for Nantucket. There are echoes at here both of Shakespeare's fantasy of shipwreck and magical discovery, The Tempest, and of Shelley's tragic drowning and grisley [[grisly]] immolation. Pym and his first double, Augustus, then ship out on the Grampus, which becomes the stage for shocking scenes of mutiny, murder, and cannibalism. A “grampus,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary, can either be “a marine mammal, Grampus griseus, related to and resembling the dolphins but Jacking a beaklike snout” or “any of several similar cetaceans, such as the killer whale.” The Dictionary derives its etymology of the name from Middle English, Old French, and Latin roots signifying “fat fish.” We are already deep into the field of biological and symbolic anomaly by this point — an anomaly (salvific dolphin or killer whale?) made ever more complex when the death-ship sighted by Pym and his starving companions is described as “a large hermaphrodite brig, of a Dutch build, and painted black, with tawdry gilt figurehead” (p. 110) This false savior, in turn, prepares us for the ambiguously titled Jane Guy, hermaphroditic in its name if not in its nautical classification, which rescues Pym and his second double, Dirk Peters, setting them on a nine-years’ pilgrimage to the South Pole. The androgynous character of the Jane Guy in turn subsumes or even devours many of the distinctly male or female names of vessels mentioned in the Narrative, such as the Mary Pitts and the Henry, the Betsey and the Nereus, the Polly and the San Miguel. The early reference to the whaler Penguin is further twisted by Pym's detailed catalogue of the types of these birds to be found on Kerguelen's Island (a list anticipating Melville's labored cetology in Moby-Dick), for Pym casually observes that “the resemblance to a human figure is very striking, and would be apt to deceive the spectator at a casual glance or in the gloom of the evening” (p. 154)

In the duplicitous world of Arthur Gordon Pym, Linnean order has broken down. Creatures belonging to one element are found in another, supposedly alien one, the habits and characteristics of species are confused and conflicting, and the green promise of a sea-going oasis turns out to be the barren deceit of Desolation Island. At last, in the topsy-turvy land of Tsalal, the Jane Guy itself is looked on as a living being by the frightened natives. Here, too, “the carcass of a singular-looking land-animal” is found, the ultimate taxidermal horror:

Still, in view of such similar zoological misfits as the duck-billed platypus, even this monster can be excused as a freak of nature. What cannot be excused is the far more devastating truth [page 63:] that while animals increasingly resemble men, even more so do men increasingly resemble animals. Thus, in his outward appearance, the half-breed Dirk Peters is little more than another side-show attraction. Pym declares that:

The immediate sources for this man-monster or human dragon might range back to the frontier tradition exemplified by Mike Fink's boast of being “half-horse, half-alligator,” but ultimately Dirk Peters springs from Poe's life-long fascination with the thin line between beast and human, epitomized in the figure of the ourang-outang in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”(12) His very name conjoins the images of a murderous knife (“dirk”) and a salvific rock (“peters”) in the same way that the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd” glimpses both a dagger and a diamond beneath the cloak of the mysterious wanderer of that tale. Appropriately, in the course of the Narrative, Peters acts both as savior and as avenging angel. With a Swiftian sense that the basest animal is man, Poe uses outward appearance to emblemize the monstrousness of human behavior. In Pym, this includes the butchering of twenty-two members of the crew of the Grampus by a black cook armed with an axe; the shooting, bludgeoning, and stabbing of most of the others on board; and a “fearful repast” of four days’ duration where Pym and Peters drink the blood and eat the flesh of their sacrificed companion, Parker. Interlaced with this is Poe's excremental focus on the slow process of human decay and dissolution. With the care of a pathologist, Pym describes in detail the corpse of Hartman Rogers, whose “horrid and loathsome” features he is soon to imitate as a means of frightening the mutineers out of their wits:

Similarly, with the prolonged description of the stench and putrefaction attendant on the arrival of that false deliverer, the Dutch death-ship, Poe seems to have reached an ultimate of [page 64:] gruesomeness for its own sake. Yet, as Pym's impersonation of the corpse of Rogers indicates, corruption itself can be a kind of metamorphosis. It is also, as death always is, an intrusion of the sacred into our ordinary, mundane world of complacent reality. In his L’Homme et le Sacré, Roger Caillois observes that “When the life of society and that of nature are bound up in the sacred personage of a king, it is the hour of his death which determines the critical instant when ritual sacrilege is unleashed.”(13) Drawing on anthropological studies of the natives of New Guinea, Fiji, and the Sandwich Islands, Caillois details the stealing, burning, pillaging, even killing which is allowed when the king, “essentially a Preserver, whose role consists of maintaining order, measure, rule,” is displaced by death and the Taw and decorum he symbolizes are destroyed. It is precisely on such “permissible sacrilege” that Faulkner bases the events of his remarkable tale, Red Leaves. But more to the point is Caillois's conclusion that, by such examples:

This is only to say that the human body, through the operation of the natural laws of physical decomposition, can become a monster, either sacred or profane. The long controversy between Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox divines over corporeal preservation as a sign of sainthood has its darker manifestation in the folklore of vampirism, where the unnatural lack of decay signifies the contagious disease of the “undead.” The cannibalism of Pym points in both of these directions: to a transvaluation of values that we can find in pagan mysticism and Christian numinism, as well as to the later horror pornography of Dracula. But Poe's emphasis on the corruptibility of human flesh in his Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym also corresponds to the alchemical stage of the putrefaction or mortification, where there is a necessary “killing” of the elements and a subsequent dissolution of the “body” of the work. The death of ordinary “seeing” gives birth to an extraordinary state of “vision,” for the Dragon itself must be destroyed, the serpent pierced or crucified, in order that it might rise again in the higher form of the Uroboros.

Other examples of dark metamorphosis, of sinister transmutation, abound in Pym, including seemingly trivial ones like the mutation of Pym's dog (a traditional emblem of faithfulness ambiguously named for a fierce and wrathful feline, “Tiger”) into a “fierce lion of the tropics” by means of a nightmare. Like Peters, who wore the skin of a dog or a grizzly bear as a wig, this creature contains savage as well as salvific elements. At one time, it goes for Pym's throat; at [page 65:] another, it disables a mutineer who is in the act of stabbing Pym's friend, Augustus. Peters is one of the original rebels and, although he is described as being one of the “less blood-thirsty of the lot,” he despatches men with a brutally cold dexterity and saves Pym from destruction more than once. Suffice it to say that the real Dragon in the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is the Dragon of chaos and doubt, the massa confusa of the alchemists, the earth-bound Leviathan of the Gnostics.(14)

Monstrosity, grotesquerie, and diablerie accelerate as. Poe's tale unravels, until at last 3 we are literally in a land where black is white and white is black. In spite of the fact that they have already been forced to confront their own inner darkness and amorality, Pym and Peters are condemned to wander through a wasteland in which the Shadow becomes visual and concrete. Only after sailing due South and “entering upon a region of novelty and wonder” set in warm waters of a “milky consistency and hue,” does the Domination of Black cease and the Reign of Whiteness begin. As Herman Melville was to write of just such an albino landscape in his chapter on “The Whiteness of the Whale” in Moby-Dick, such a precinct is holy ground, the threshold of a god, for, when the ordinary mariner is:

The growing numbness, drowsiness, and listlessness of the adventurers, as well the yawning cataract they are approaching, seem to substantiate a strict Freudian reading of Pym's catastrophe 2 as a return to the womb.(16) But the “white ashy shower,” the luminosity, and the effects of the Aurora Borealis which are also encountered suggest a parallel alchemical projection, a coruscation of all colors and a conjunction of elemental substances into one.

In this respect, it is interesting to note that Jung's disciple, Erich Neumann, closely links Uroboric imagery to the archetype of the mother and the rondure of the fetal womb. Here, too, beginning and ending merge and in the primal sea which washes the fetus, life is renewed and the cycle of existence continued. The womb is a “natural” symbol of eternity as is the sea itself, and it is upon the sea that the drama of Arthur Gordon Pym is played out. If the Dragon symbolizes disorder, misrule, aberration, the Uroboros stands for cohesion, assimilation, primal unity. Neumann writes:

I would suggest that Neumann's chapter on “The Creation Myth: The Uroboros” in his The Origins and History of Consciousness can serve as an extended gloss for the events which take place in Poe's Narrative. Since Pym himself is continually under the rule of “The Mothers,” his is an initial stage of consciousness struggling to free itself from the slumber of “unconscious envelopment.” The world of Pym is a prenatal one, and Pym emerges as “an embryonic and still undeveloped germ of ego consciousness ... swimming in the ocean of the unborn” (p. 12). This “prehistoric state of being” would explain much that is puzzling about the Narrative: Poe's fascination with dream-like, hypnagogic states; the constant premature burial and resurrection of Pym, his prolonged periods of lethargy, inaction, and listlessness, and even more so his inability to learn from experience, his infantile naiveté. As Neumann takes pains to make clear:

It is just such a world or cosmic region of the maternal uroboros that Pym enters and, though Neumann warns about concretizing the primordial symbol of the womb, Poe presents us with numerous materializations of this archetype. Indeed, the modern reader is inevitably reminded of John Barth's ironic use of the same motif in his outrageous science-fiction romance, “Night-Sea Journey.”(18) But Barth is parodying mythic material which “came into consciousness” only after the development of Jungian psychology; Poe was constantly working with occult sources that were later to form the basis for this same psychological approach. Thus, after the wreck of the Ariel, Pym and Augustus cling umbilically to the floating wreckage; Pym is imprisoned in the womb-like hold of the Grampus and dreams that “Immense serpents held me in their embrace, and looked earnestly in my face with their fearfully shining eyes” (p. 28); he and the survivors of the mutiny again descend into this dark, viscous place in order to bring up life-sustaining nourishment; Peters and Pym fasten themselves to the overturned hull of the vessel, and feast on the “large barnacles, which proved to be excellent and highly nutritious food” (p. 144) p; at last they explore the uterine labyrinths of Tsalal, which turn out to be hieroglyphic chasms spelling out a yin-yang conjunction of the Ethiopian and Arabic roots for “To be shady” and “To be white.”(19) Much of Pym's problem is that, as an embryonic, infantile consciousness, he has not yet learned how to read, how to decipher the runes of mythic reality. Just as his path is beset by monsters and dragons which image the [page 67:] horrors of arrested development and unfulfillment, so is it strewn with unassimilated symbols of completed cosmic design, the Uroboros. In contrast to Herman Melville, who in The Encantadas read the Galapagos tortoise as an emblem of the mixed nature of experience, Pym provides merely a matter-of-fact description of this same sea-turtle, whose rondure and self-sufficiency mark it off as an avatar of the cosmic tail-biter:

In speaking of the ancient Egyptian symbol of the Uraboros, equally self-sufficient and 1ife-sustaining, Neumann states that “It slays, weds, and impregnates itself. It is man and woman, begetting and conceiving, devouring and giving birth, active and passive, above and below, at once” (p. 10). Poe makes much of a similarly mysterious creature, the mollusc called bouche-de-mer or béche-de-mer, which has “no shell, no legs, nor any prominent part, except an absorbing and an excretory, opposite organs” (p. 197). That a sea can be sentient, that it can possess a body and even a mouth (bouche de mer), is a thought which never enters Pym's mundane mind, though “MS. Found in a Bottle” does indicate that it was very much a preoccupation of Pym's creator. Of the archetypal circularity of these oddities he can only add, “They are nearly round, a little flattish on one side, which lies to the bottom of the sea; and they are from one to eight inches thick” (p. 197). Once again, Pym violates the sacred by treating this totem as a purely commercial commodity, unaware that the region of the South which he has entered is holy ground, where nourishment for the spirit is more important than nutrition for the body.(20) Like any sacred realm, the island of Tsalal is a place where values have been transvalued. As in Pym's early dream in the hold of the Grampus, this circular world is at once hostile and smothering, a land of deserts and morasses where everything returns upon itself.

Armed with “clubs, of a dark, and apparently very heavy wood,” and provided with canoes whose bottoms “were full of black stones about the size of a large egg” (p. 181), Tsalal's jet-black natives are appropriate emissaries of the Uroboric Mother, whose talismans, Neumann reminds us, are the calabash and the egg (8-9). It is also significant that, while the white men are exploring the island, “One or two serpents of a formidable aspect crossed our path, but the natives paid them little attention” (p. 190) and that the dwellings of these same savages “were mere [page 68:] holes dug in the earth perpendicularly” or “small shallow caverns, apparently scratched in the face of a precipitous ledge of dark stone” (p. 189). With the ambush of the crew in “a narrow gorge,” the “1iving inhumation” of Pym and Peters under the fallen earth, the firey [[fiery]] explosion of the Jane Guy, and the subsequent wanderings in hieroglyphic caverns, a stage is set for the grand finale of the psycho-drama of consciousness which is Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Neumann characterizes this denouement as “Uroboric incest,” and he describes it as:

We have now, if I may be allowed the metaphor, come full circle to the final scene of Pym, with the inhabitants of the canoe sunk into dreaminess and stupor, the death of the captive Nu-Nu, the hail of white ashes, the heating up of the milky waters, and the rushing plunge into the cataract. I will leave my readers to decipher the significance of the facts that “Nu” is the thirteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, and that, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, it derives from a Phoenician word meaning “fish,” from a Semitic root nym meaning “to increase” or, possibly, “to endure.”(21) Though no dragons have been slain in Poe's Narrative, they have at least by now been absorbed into the Uroboric whole. What Walter Bezanson has called “The Troubled Sleep of Arthur Gordon Pym” is at an end,(22) for the first act of the drama of consciousness, that of the metamorphoses of the embryo, has been fulfilled. No more will Pym be forced to resist the pull of his ego into the unconscious, experiencing “the downward drag of its specific gravity.” If we follow the admirable paradigm outlined by Neumann, the “gigantic curtain” he encounters can be nothing less than the veil of Isis, and the “shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men,” whose skin is “of the perfect whiteness of the snow,” none other than the Great Mother herself. Recalling Arthur Gordon Pym's remarkable Tuck, his role as a fortunate fool who is helped out of every distress by amazing graces and surprising providences, I wish to conclude with Neumann's overview of this embryonic pleormatic [[pleromatic]] phase:

The positive side of the Great Mother seems to be embodied in this stage of the [page 69:] urobores. Only at a very much higher Tevel will the “good” Mother appear again. Then, when she no longer has to do with an embryonic ego, but with an adult personality matured by rich experience of the world, she reveals herself anew as Sophia, the “gracious” Mother, or, pouring forth her riches in the creative fullness of true productivity, as the “Mother of All Living.”(p. 15)

We can only hope that, in the lost chapters which detail what happens after his confrontation with the Great Mother, Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym finds this higher level, separates himself from the Uroboros, transcends the matriarchal world, and leaves the passive uncertainties of the Creation Myth for the active challenges of the Hero Myth.(23) Only then would his Metamorphosis be complete, for only then would he attain that “wisdom that is woe” Melville's Ishmael achieves. For this is the “Sophia” of which Neumann speaks, and Ishmael differs from Pym chiefly in the fact that, through his struggle with the Dragon and the Uroboros in Moby-Dick, Ishmael has both grown — and grown up.

Brown University

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Notes

1 See, for example: Richard A. Levine, “The Downward Journey of Purgation: Notes on an Imagistic Leitmotif in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Poe Newsletter, II (1969), 29-31. Grace Farrell Lee, “The Quest of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Southern Literary Journal, 4 (1972), 22-23. Kathleen Sands, “The Mythic Initiation of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Poe Studies, 7 (1974), 14-16.

2 See, for example: Patrick Quinn, The French Face of Edgar Allan Poe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957), 169-215. L. Moffit Cecil, “The Two Narratives of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 5 (1963), 231-241. J. V. Ridgely and Iola S. Haverstick, “Chartless Voyage: The Many Narratives of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Texas Studies, 7 (1966), 63-80. Sidney p. Moss, “Arthur Gordon Pym, or The Fallacy of Thematic Interpretation,” University Review, 23 (1967), 299-306.

3 See my articles: “Poe's ‘Sober Mystification’: The Uses of Alchemy in ‘The Gold-Bug,’” Poe Studies, 4 (1971), 1-7. “Usher Unveiled: Poe and the Metaphysic of Gnosticism,” Poe Studies, 5 (1972), 1-8. “The Mysteries of Edgar Poe: The Quest for a Monomyth in Gothic Literature,” in The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism, ed. G. R. Thompson (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1974), 65-93.

4 Irving Massey notes an aspect of Ovid that might broadly be called “comic” and quotes Charles Segal on the “fluidity” and “non-tragic compromise” which characterize the higher transformations of the Metamorphoses. See The Gaping Pig: Literature and Metamorphosis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 24.

5 See: Daniel Hughes, “Blake and Shelley: Beyond the Uroboros,” in William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon, ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Providence: Brown University Press, 1969), 69-83. Robert A. Hartley, “The Uroboros in Shelley's Poetry,” JEGP, 73 (1974), 139-153.

6 The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell and Co.,1902), Vol. VI, p. 232. 2. On Poe's use of the circle motif, see Georges Poulet, The Metamorphoses [page 70:] of the Circle, trans. Carley Dawson and Elliott Coleman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966), 182-202.

7 In his Preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), Poe states that “The epithets ‘Grotesque’ and “Arabesque’ will be found to indicate with sufficient precision the prevalent tenor of the tales here published.”

8 Marcus Vitruvius, De Architectura, VII, Vol.3. See: Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 20. Arthur Clayborough, The Grotesque in English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 19-20.

9 Richard Wilbur, “The House of Poe,” in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), 267.

10 Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, The Secret Art of Alchemy (New York: Bounty Books, 1973),

11. Poe, Complete Works, Vol. III, 17-18. Hereafter, all references to Pym will refer to this volume and appear in the text.

12 5ee Erich W. Sippel, “Bolting the Whole Shebang Together: Poe's Predicament,” Criticism, 15 (1973), 289-308.

13 Roger Caillois, L’Homme et le Savré (Paris: Galllimard, 1950), 153. I am indebted to Bernard Keith Waldrop for first bringing my attention to this passage.

14 See Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 116-118. For an interpretation of Pym as a dream-story following “the pattern of Gnostic return,” see Richard Wilbur, Introduction to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (Boston: David R. Godine, 1973), vii-xxv.

15 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, eds. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), 168.

16 See Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation (London: Hogarth Press, 1949), 290-352.

17 Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness [1954] (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton/ Bollingen, 1970), 13-14. For similar uses of Neumann as a means of interpreting Poe, see: Mark M. Hennelly, Jr., “Oedipus and Orpheus in the ‘Maelström’: The Traumatic Rebirth of the Artist,” Poe Studies, 9 (1976), 6-11. Colin Martindale, “Archetype and Reality in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’” Poe Studies, 5 (1972), 9-11. Martin Bickman, “Animatopoeia: Morella as a Siren of the Self,” Poe Studies, 8 (1975), 29-32.

18 See John Barth, “Night-Sea Journey,” Lost in the Funhouse (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), 3-12.

19 1n an unpublished paper entitled “The Arabic References in the Works of Poe,” Hassan I. Mekouar notes that Poe's hieroglyph for “To be white” is very different from the actual Arabic script for “white” and “whiteness.” He speculates that it may be an attempt to copy the phrase meaning “the limit of the sea, or the end of the ocean” and observes that this expression “figures in numerous books by medieval Arab geographers such as Abulfeda. In Abulfeda's Geographie are several maps in which the ‘world’ is round and limited by a circle. The continents and countries look 1ike islands inside the ocean which borders the circle. Beyond is the unknown. The edge would usually be labelled the ‘end of the sea’ or the ‘limit of the Ocean.’” Mekouar establishes that Abulfeda's work was known in Europe in various editions and that a new translation appeared in 1840, two years after the publication of Poe's Narrative. He concludes that “Poe borrowed the Arabic-looking phrase from the first book he could find.” This contrasts with Sidney Kaplan's assumption in his Introduction to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960) that Poe's Arabic is correct and drawn from the Lexicon of Gesenius (xxxi). Mekouar's speculation about the derivation of Poe's hieroglyph from the idea of a circle strengthens, of course, my tracing of Uroboric imagery in his work. It also reemphasizes the meaning of the Uroboros as a container of opposites, a synthesis of cosmic blackness and whiteness (see Fig. 1). To another student, Daniel Scharfman, I am indebted for the suggestion that, in the Roman world, the word cela often took the meaning “from the house of a deity.” Celi (pronounced ‘keli’) is a genitive form and te is the vocative of tu, meaning “you.” Thus, “Te-keli(-li),” screamed by the [page 71:] birds of Tsalal, could mean “O you! From the house of a deity!” This cry, taken up by the natives and directed at the white intruders, would further indicate the conception of whiteness as a sign of divinity in Tsalal.

20 In his Introduction to the Godine Pym, Richard Wilbur writes that “If there is one constant explicit theme in this tale of a hero who yearns for ‘shipwreck and famine,’ it is that of eating and drinking, of hunger and thirst. I find an old marginal note in my copy of the book which reads, “Gold Bug” is a quest for absolute treasure, “Ms.” for absolute knowledge, Pym for absolute nutrition’” (xxiv). In this connection and especially in regard to the cannibalism which infects the Narrative, it is interesting to note what Neumann has to say about the “nutritional side” as the only important factor” for the infantile ego:

What is the bouche-de-mer, as described by Poe, but an animal which is pure alimentary canal? It is also a main source of food for both the natives of Tsalal and the crew of the Jane Guy.

21 I am indebted to Professor J. Gerald Kennedy for bringing these facts to my attention.

22 See Walter G. Bezanson, “The Troubled Sleep of Arthur Gordon Pym” in Essays in Literary History Presented to Milton French, eds. Rudolph Kirk and C. F. Main (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1960), 145-175.

23 My conclusion here adumbrates Edward H. Davidson's observation that “if Pym's quest is for selfhood, for first principles and primal being, it is also a moving backward through the natural order as it presently exists and into the world's original condition, as primal first cause,” Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 178. I also agree with David La Guardia's contention that “Pym never reaches that state of ultimate maturity and wisdom experienced by other famous initiates,” but not with his assertion that “He exists in a series of increasingly perceptive selves, each buoyed by the experience that has capsized the former, each moving toward a better,” “Poe, Pym, and Initiation,” Emerson Society Quarterly, 60 (1970, Supplement II), 82. Rather, as Pascal Covici has noted, in the context of Pym, “the issue of ‘development’ never even arises. Pym is what he is, a mode of consciousness,” “Toward a Reading of Poe's Narrative of A. Gordon Pym,” Mississippi Quarterly, 21 (Spring 1968), 112.