The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
by Edgar Allen Poe
As editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, Poe sent a
collection of his earliest stories to James Kirk Paulding in
1836. He requested that Paulding "urge them upon the
attention of Harper and Brothers. Sometime later Paulding
wrote to tell him that the publishers could see no chance
for profit in such a venture and to suggest that 'it would be
worth your while...to undertake a tale in a couple of
volumes, for that is the magical number'" (Krutch vii).
Poe accepted the suggestion and published Chapter I and
part of Chapter II appeared in The Southern Literary
Messenger for January, 1837. The same magazine
published the rest of Chapter II, Chapter III, and part of
Chapter IV in February. The completed work was
published simultaneously in New York and England in
1838.
Most of the narrative's adventures are set on his ship headed to the Antarctica, a place
Poe never visited. On his journey he gives detailed accounts of his adventures, and he
offers remarkable scientific description of certain animals, although he had never sailed,
except once as a passenger.
Literary Contemporaries of Poe
Herman Melville (1819 - 1891) good friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne, dedicated his
novel Moby Dick (1851) to him.
Possible influence by The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym on Melville:
Melville lived in New York until 1839 when he went to sea as a sailor because he
could find no work on land. He went to Liverpool and back, then moved to Illinois to
find work.
Melville became a whaleman and sailed Cape Horn in 1841. This brought him
experience with island living and cannibals and a mutiny at sea. These experiences gave
him accurate background and knowledge to write many of his short stories and Moby
Dick, which includes detailed accounts of his adventures and remarkable scientific
description of certain animals.
Both the Pequod in Moby Dick and Arthur Pym sail from Nantucket.
"Poe's opening sentence: 'My name is Arthur Gordon Pym' becomes more dramatic,
immediate and familiar in Melville's 'Call me Ishmael.' Pym and Ishmael each have a
ferocious, exotic, half-savage comrade who saves his life....Pym's journey culminates in a
confrontation with an enigmatic evil, a menacing white being in a strange white
sea....Melville's Ahab seeks...the destruction of Moby Dick, the white whale that
represents both untamed nature and the evil in Ahab himself....Melville's comment on the
sinister atmosphere of Moby-Dick applies with equal force to Poe's Pym: "A polar wind
blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it" (Meyers 50).
Nathaniel Hawthorne's (1804 - 1864) father was a sea captain, Captain Nathaniel
Hathorne of Salem (w added later), and his works are allegories written between 1835 1860. Jeffrey Meyers considers Poe's influence on Hawthorne in Edgar Allen Poe: His
Life and Legacy. Scribners, 1992.
Contemporary Influence on The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
"When Poe was a boy of nine, an ex-captain of infantry, one John Cleves Symmes, living
in St. Louis, [declared that] the earth is hollow and habitable within...that it is open at the
poles [where there is] a warm and rich land stocked with thrifty vegetables and animals,
if not men..." This is the Theory of "Symmes' Hole" also referred to in Walden by
Thoreau (Kaplan 151).
According to Kaplan, "In April 1836, Jeremiah N. Reynolds" told a story about "Mocha
Dick," and he "urged Congress, in the House of Representatives, to explore the South
Seas....Reynold's was a public defender of Symmes" (152).
"Poe was probably acquainted with a certain J.N.Reymolds, then engaged in promoting
an expedition to the Antarctica, and he had himself been reading several books which
dealt with exploration in remote regions" (Krutch vii).
"A few hours before he died his strange death in Baltimore he began to cry out for 'one
Reynolds' and he continued to do so until the final exhaustion came upon him....[T]here
is no surviving evidence to indicate that the Antarctic adventurer was more than a casual
acquaintance of the poet....But Poe, in his last agony, had leaped back over a period of
sixteen years and was busy with the memory of certain scenes in this early story....
Reynold['s]...descriptions...had doubtless predominated the silence, the isolation, and the
emptiness which were to become so regular a feature of the world of his morbid
visions...and...[Poe] was just giving up his last effort to make some human adjustment to
imagination which had destroyed him" (viii - ix).
Language in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
Tsalal
Klock-Klock
Too_Wit
Tsalemon
"to be dark"
"to be black"
"to be dirty"
"shady"
Hebrew
Hebrew
Hebrew
Hebrew
"Anamoo-moo! Lama-Lama!" "What ship is this?
What evil sent by God upon the water?" Hebrew derivative
"Tekeli-li!" (from "Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin"--you've been weighed in the
balances
and found wanting--Daniel's revelation of God's word to Belshazzar)
Hebrew
Nu-Nu
"to deny"
"mattee non we pa pa si"
"There is no need of arms when all are brothers"
"mattee"
"spear"
Hebrew
"non we pa pa si"
combined: Latin, English, Italian
Wampoos or Yampoos
"great men"
Swift's Yahoos and the race
of Ham
(Kaplan 155 - 157)
Stickney 4
Characterization
Tsalalians -- black, very wicked folk. Their name is their meaning -- "the black dust"
-- "the most barbarous, subtle, and bloodthirsty wretches that ever
contaminated" the earth.
-- "the most wicked, hypocritical, vindictive, bloodthirsty, and altogether fiendish
race of men upon the face of the globe."
Seymour -- the brutal black cook who is the "perfect demon." (Poe 56)
Too-Wit -- island chief
The enemy of the Tsalalians is Whiteness
(Kaplan 157 - 160)
Poe's Southern Influence
The eternal hostility of black and white: "God divided the light from the darkness" and
"formed man from the dust of the ground."
Poe ends his Narrative with words that sound like they come from Scripture, as the Bible
has no prophecy of Black damnation clear enough for his needs. In the closing line of
Pym the Divinity speaks: "I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the
dust within the rock." The Abolitionist quoted Psalm 68: "Ethiopia will soon stretch out
her hands unto God," but the outstretched hand of the god of the chasm reaches out to
the region of whiteness. "And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a
chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human
figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the
skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of snow." Pym rushes from the Black into
the embracing arms of the comforting White, while the gigantic white birds shriek God's
"Tekel" and Nu-Nu dies of fright." Poe, as critic and fictionist, was no friend of the
Negro" (Kaplan 160 - 163).
"Tsalal was no garden of beauty but the intent was the same. It was the 'will of God' that
Poe tried to present in his allegory of black and white at the end of Pym" (163).
It is on March 22, the first full day of spring, that Pym is taken by the white god.
Stickney 5
Symbolism in Pym as an allegory
Poe wrote that the allegory, "if 'properly handled, judiciously subdued, seen only as a
shadow or by suggestive glimpses' may fulfill the function of the tale, namely to
stimulate the reader to intense, psychic excitement" (qtd. in Edgar 15).
Poe also wrote this definition:
A skillful artist has constructed a tale. He has not fashioned the thoughts to
accommodate his incidents, but having deliberately conceived a certain single
effect to be wrought, he then invents such incidents, he then combines such
incidents, he then combines such events, and discusses them in such a tone as may
best serve him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very first sentence
tends not to the out-bringing of this effect, then in his very first step he has
committed a blunder. In the whole of the composition there should be no word
written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one prestablished
design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted
which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of
the fullest satisfaction." (15-16)
Patrick J. Quinn found the narrative to be "the intense death wish....With his great
imagination of disaster, Poe integrates the evil of men and the evil inherent in the nature
of the material universe..." (qtd. in Kaplan 148).
"The search for the self is the loss of the self; the quest is the annihilation. To remain in
ignorance is to maintain one's primal being; to be curious is to be suicidal. The world of
reality constantly undergoes this cyclical metamorphosis, from life to death and back to
life again; but man, though a creature submissive to the natural laws around him, can go
only to death or perhaps to...the silence of total annihilation" (Edward H. Davidson qtd.
in Kaplan 149).
"[T]he realism of Pym's trials in queer settings may be a gambit to establish a 'willing
suspension of disbelief' in the allegory to which they lead" (Bryant qtd. in Kaplan 149).
On the ending of the Narrative, Arthur Hobson Quinn wrote: "But when the details of the
voyages have long been forgotten, the picture of the mysterious figure remains,
stimulating the imagination of those readers who do not have everything explained to
them in words of one syllable" (qtd. in Kaplan 149 - 150).
"It is evident that we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge--some never-tobe-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction. Perhaps this current leads us to the
southern pole itself" (Poe's MS. Found in a Bottle qtd. in Kaplan 150).
Stickney 6
Symbolism in Pym as an allegory, con't.
Edward Davidson concludes that at the end of his journey Pym is sailing toward "that
whiteness whose center lies beyond first things and whose nexus may be the creative
impulse of the earth itself....There was no other word or term which could further report
the vision of nothing on the other side. Nothing was all; there was no other word for it
but 'white'' (qtd. in Kaplan 154).
John T. Irwin is convinced that the figure at the pole is a white shadow, and that it is
Pym's own shadow. Such an idea accounts for the premise that Pym does return home
after his adventures to tell them and have them published by Poe. Irwin supports his
claim by citing the similarities from the ending of Pym and "the numerous examples of
the trope of the white shadow in Romantic tradition (particularly among authors whom
Poe admired)." In Coleridge's poem Constancy to an Ideal Object (1828), "the speaker is
haunted by a 'yearning Thought' that 'liv'st but in the brain,' the thought of the idealized
woman who is synonymous with home. Yet this ideal can only be realized when 'Hope
and Despair meet in the porch of Death!' (1:455-56). Without this companion, any place
where the speaker dwells is like 'a becalmed bark, / Whose Helmsman on an ocean waste
and wide / Sits mute and pale his mouldering helm beside' (1:456). The poem concludes
with the speaker's acknowledgment that this ideal object is an unrecognizable shadow
image that he himself projected:
And art thou nothing! Such thou art, as when
The woodman winding westward up the glen
At wintry dawn, where o'er the sheep track's maze
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist'ning haze,
Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
An image with a glory round its head;
The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues,
Nor knows he makes the shadow, he pursues! (1:456). (Irwin 102)
Other sources Irwin uses to support this theory that the white shadow is Pym's shadow:
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) by James Hogg
Letters on Natural Magic (1832) by David Brewster
Walden (1854) by Henry David Thoreau
These sources include discussions of the Aurora Borealis and natural optical illusions
present as a result of a current of vapor and the position of the sun in the Polar regions.
"According to Brewster, a hallucinatory image involves a reversal of energy that alters
the relative intensities of visula images and mental images on the retina, with the result
that a mental image becomes vivid enough to be taken for a visual image, indeed
becomes so vivid at times as to blot out a visual image....As Pym's canoe approaches the
curtain of vapor, he and his companions drift into a liminal state of consciousness..."
(107).
Stickney 7
Symbolism in Pym as an allegory, con't.
Irwin's essay continues with a discussion of dreams: "Whatever the status of Poe's
'fancies,' one thing is clear: his desire to make a fully conscious incursion into the
unconscious realm of sleep and return with a written record of his impressions--that
'paper' which would compel the world to acknowledge that he had 'done an original
thing'--of consciousness with some original word about the unconscious realm of death"
(109).
The sources Irwin uses for this support are:
The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated by Bishop Warburton
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) by Henry David Thoreau
"In the mythus of a superhuman intelligence uses the unconscious thoughts and
dreams of men as its hieroglyphics to address men unborn" (qtd. 110).
The Prelude Book 8 by Wordsworth, who refers to Paul's letter in 2 Corinthians
comparing individual Christians to "the epistle of Christ...written not with ink, but
with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the
heart."
"For both Wordsworth and Paul, man's being is inscribed. It is a writing that can be read
according to either the dead letter or the living spirit, a figure can be interpreted either as
the dark shadow of the mortal body...or as a bright reflection in a glass....Clearly, the
opposition of dead letter and living spirit in both Paul and Wordsworth is an image
governed by the mortalized black/white opposition of writing. The letter is dead because
it is dark, the lithic shadow of an inanimate literality, like the engraving on a tombstone;
while the meaning that must be interpreted or translated from the dark script, the
quickening sense that hovers about the writing like the white page about the black outline
of the characters or the nimbus about the body, is the radiant spirit."
That the figure that Pym sees in the mist is a white shadow, his own shadow
unrecognized, seems especially likely when we consider the figure's association with
Christ's transfiguration and resurrection, and the fact that the only narrated instance of
Pym's seeing his own image in a mirror occurs during a mock resurrection in which he
purposely transfigures his appearance" (111-112). Following a mutiny aboard ship, Pym
put on the clothes of the dead seaman Hartman Rogers, who was apparently poisoned by
the leader of the mutiny.
..."Pym's mock resurrection evokes as well the necessary link between the concept of a
resurrection and the reversal of values inherent in a black white revenge morality...(113).
...Paul says that here " we see through a glass darkly" but there "face to face" (I Corinthians 13:12); here we know by means of signs and symbols, but there signs and symbols
cease to exist. "The difficulty is that human consciousness is itself the dark glass, the self
being at once the image reflected in the mirror and the mirror self-reflection, and that to
speak of the self's survival in a realm devoid of signs and images makes no
sense....[A]lthough the limitations of the self cannot be made the measure of what lies
beyond those limits, they remain the rule for the self's own existence, for any mnemonic
Stickney 8
Symbolism in Pym as an allegory, con't
continuity after death. As a symbolic entity the self could not exist in an asymbolic realm
(115).
..."[W]hen Poe subtly exhibits...spiritual survival in Pym...[he] directs our attention to the
problematic quality of all self-conscious existence, the fundamentally alogical status of
the self" (117).
Harold Bloom records that "Poe teaches us, through Pym,..that as Americans we are
both subject and object of our own quests. Emerson, in Americanizing the European
sense of the abyss, kept the self and the abyss separate as facts: 'There may be two or
three or four steps, according to the geniu of each, but for every seeing soul there are two
absorbing facts--I and the Abyss.' Poe, seeking to avoid Emersonianism, ends with only
one fact, and it is more a wish than a fact: 'I will to be the Abyss.' The metaphysical
despair has appealed to the Southern American literary tradition and to its Northern
followers. The appeal cannot be refuted, because it is myth, and Poe backed the myth
with his life as well as his work. If the Northern or Emersonian myth of our literary
cylture culminates as the beautiful image of Walt Whitman as [Civil War] wound
dresser,..then the Southern or counter-myth...[is] with Poe's snow-white shadow
shrouding the chasm down which the boat of the soul is about to plunge" (11).
As an Adventure Story
According to W.H. Auden, in "Gordon Pym the relation of will to environment is
reversed....[I]n these stories of pure adventure the hero is as purely passive as the I in
dreams; nothing that happens is the result of his personal choice, everything happens to
him. What the subject feels--interest, excitement, terror--are caused by events over
which -he has no control whatsoever....[T]his...[hero] cannot change, he can only
experience....It is not without interest that the development of such fiction in which the
historical individual is missing should have coincided with the development of history as
a science, with its own laws, and the appearance of the great nineteenth-century
historians; further, that both these developments should accompany the industrialization
and urbanization of social life in which the individual seems more and more the creation
of historical forces while he himself feels less capable of affecting his life by any
historical choice of his own..." (59 - 60).
Stickney 9
As a Preview for Later Works
As a stowaway, Pym lives in a box below the deck, and his imprisonment stimulates
claustrophobia later developed in Premature Burial.
When passing the plague stricken ship, Pym gives an account of the bodies upon whom
death must have come "in a manner awfully sudden and overwhelming," used as a
preliminary sketch for the tale of the Red Death (Krutch xi).
Critical Review of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
"...Gordon Pym...rank[s] among Poe's most important works...(Auden 57).
...Gordon Pym, one of the finest stories ever written, is an object lesson in art. Every
kind of adventure occurs...yet each leads incredibly to the next" (59).
"Alfred Russel Wallace, the evolutionist, wrote to a friend" '...the Antarctic part
completely spoils it, being so completely impossible, with its abundant vegetation, mild
climate, fruits and land animals near the South Pole! Also the fantastic idea of striped
water is utterly unnecessary...it was these absurdities that disgusted me with the story'"
(Kaplan 146).
"...Poe's novel mocks the exuberance for exploration voyages and voyage accounts that
gripped America in the 1830's. Form critics frequently identify three problems with the
novel--the insertion of tedious and seemingly irrelevant non-original material; its lack of
cohesion; its anti-climatic ending and concluding riddle....[T]he quality of Poe's work lies
not in its integrity of form but in its response to form" (Gitelman).
Stickney 10
Works Cited
Auden, W.H. "Poe's Theatricality Is Essential to His Work." Bender 57 - 63.
Bender, David, pub. Readings on Edgar Allen Poe. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1998.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Edgar Allen Poe. New York, Chelsea House
Publishers, 1985.
"Did rabies fell Edgar Allen Poe?" Science News. 2 Nov 1966. 8 Feb. 1998. n
available: Infotrac.
"Edgar Allen Poe." The Gale Group. 29 pag. available: Gale Literary Databases. pn
DLB0442BIO0442. 8 Feb. 1998.
Gitelman, Lisa. "Arthur Gordon Pym and the Novel Narrative of Edgar Allen Poe."
NCL-E, v47 n3, Gitelman Abstracts http://www.siue.edu/^jvoller/authors/title.html.
8 Feb. 1998
"Hawthorne, Nathaniel." World Book Encyclopedia. 1962.
Irwin, John T. "The White Shadow." Bloom 103-120.
Kaplan, Sidney. "An Introduction to Pym." Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed.
Robert Regan. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967. 145 - 163.
Krutch, Joseph Wood. Introduction. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allen
Poe. New York: The Heritage Press, 1930. vii - xvi.
"Melville, Herman" World Book Encyclopedia. 1962.
Meyers, Jeffrey. "Poe Heavily Influenced Other Writers." Bender 49 - 56.
Poe, Edgar Allen. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. New York: The Heritage Press,
1930.
"Poe, Edgar Allen." World Book Encyclopedia. 1962.