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This is to certify that the

dissertation entitled
"A Dialogue with Unreason": The Critical History of

Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,
1838-1993

 

presented by

Ronald C. Harvey

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

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——
MSU I. An Ann AL A n - a A

 

”A Dialogue with Unreason": The Critical History of
Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon gm, 1838—1993

BY
Ronald C. Harvey

A DISSERTATIW
Suhnitted to
Michigan State miversity
in partial fulfillment: of the requirements
for the degree of
Duct-pr of Philosophy
English Deparmu:

1995

 

‘1‘

p In

"A Dialogue with Unreason": 'Ihe Critical History of

nigar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon 5!: 1838-1993

BY

Rmald C.Harvey

Critics and other readers have consistently viewed Edgar Allan
Poe's The thrrative of Arthur Gordon m as a problem In his only long
fictim, Poe calfounds expectations seeningly at every turn. He
affronts the reader with flagrant mrbidity; aggression and terror
cimflatelilnebloodthroughatextthatnmethelessmovestowarda
visionary adunbraticn. Poe speaks to us, as Fanault said of Raymxd
Mussel, in'alarguagethatoxmstousfrmthedepthsofanightthat
is perfectly clear and inpossible to daninate."

And so it has proven. 'lhe canplex, winding route Em has followed
from near-oblivion to the central Poe text has been a history of
dissensus on almost every level at which critics and scholars read
texts; and of dramatic change between critical generations. the unique
set of thmtic and narrative problem the work poses has eluded so far
every hermaeutic stnnture brwght against it. consistently undermining
the very reading strategies it seems to invite.

'me first carprehensive history of the American reception of 1319,

this study addresses every published critical statement that could be

fund, as it analyzes the canplex response to a peculiarly indeterminant
text. In the process it elaborates the ways in which critics and
critical cams have sought to conceptualize the text armmd their own
assumptions and caverns, in their varied attempts to confront,
ratimalize, contain, or evade its\ novel and disturbing features.

Following an introduction establishing the theoretical pranisos,
the study traces, in order: the widely varied contemporary response,
and um considers the relative silence of the following one hundred
years (chapter two); the psychological analysis and interpretation
(chapter three); the forml analysis and interpretation of New Critics
and others, including formal conclusions inferred fran the reconstructed
cuposition process and sources (chapter four); historicist location of
3! within sale cultural or literary tradition, including versions of
Purican historiography and international Ralanticism (chapter five);
and the modernist and poststructural readings of 31!, which find in the
narrative's rich seif—referattiality meaningful metaliterary critiques
of the representatimal capacity of language and the determination of
tie subject (chapter six).

 

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ACKNOWLEDGMENPS

I would like to express thanks to the members of my committee, and
especially to Michael Lopez for his assistance and patience, during this
process and throughout my program. I am also grateful to Lorraine Hart.
I cannot inagine I would have navigated these waters to a successful
conclusion without her assistance on countless occasions. Her generous
spirit is one of best things about Michigan State University.

Support has cane from other sources as well. Craig Stutzky, Carol
Rho, Dan Reed, Julie Humphrey, and Gloria and Bill Hume have been rich,
faithful sources of personal support and inspiration; I am enriched for
my association with each of these true friends.

For his intelligent perceptions and observations over many hours
of conversation on this mterial, but more importantly for his
friendship, I owe a special debt of gratitude to David Stinson.

Finally, for their upright example, their unflagging confidence
and their unconditional love, I thank my parents, Ruth and Paul Harvey,

to whan this dissertation is dedicated.

 

TABLEOFWPS

me
"An Impudent and Ingenious Fiction":
Introduction

mapter'l‘wo
'WeDoNotSeeAnyGoodI-hdinSuchDescriptions":
thralcerzsureandttaeFirstmmdredYears

Gapter Three
'A Language from the Depths":
Psychological Models

(mapter Four
"I Once Wrote a Very Silly Book":
The Problem of Form

Five
"A Correspondatt Coloring":
The Historical Orimtation
Gupta: Six
“A11 tie Outward Signs of Intelligibility":
H! and tbdernian
Afterword
Bibliography

m Criticism 1838-1993
General List

vi

51

152

193

241

272

283
292

Chapter One

"An Impudent and Ingenious Fiction": Introduction

Aims

In much of his work Michel Foucault reveals a fascination for
artists of a certain kind: Holderlin, Nietzsche, Raymond Roussel and
others. In their art they have kept alive throughout the reign of
reason in the Western world what, as he says, was restored to science
only in the twentieth century by Freud, "the possibility of a dialogue
with unreason" (Madness 198). Theirs is a language which, as he said
of Roussel's, "cares to us from the depths of a night that is perfectly
clear and impossible to dominate" (qtd. in Racevskis 49). If one were
to choose an American book which comes to us from such an ulterior
region, and has itself proven more than any other to be "impossible to

,M“_.. N.“ .n

dominate, " that work could well he Poe' s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Em.
P/F

 

In attenpting my own interpretation of Poe's single booklength
narrative, I encountered a renarkable critical history, one which has
changed dramatically with the critical generations, and one which can be
characterized as dissensus on nearly every level at which critics and
scholars read tarts. Satisfying answers to questions of the work's
leaning and its nerit se- perpetually to recede ahead of us, as the

lost basic questions about the text and its composition renain open:

the genre of the work, the seriousness or levity of the author's intent,
its stature as a work of genius, hackwork, or sanething in between, and
even its state of canpletion. Yet it is the question of the meaning SQ
supposed message implicit in the text, regarded, if one is perceived at,”
all, as variously apocalyptic, nihilistic, mysterious, confused,
radical, or nonsensical, to name a few, that provides the most :
interesting and potentially fruitful set of issues. Poe scholars and if
literary historians who turn to 3m in the context of contenporary/
theory, as they are doing in ever increasing numbers, encounter not a
unified, progressive history of criticism, but a uniquely complex and
rich body of commentary, varying widely in quality, anphasis and
assessnent. It seened, therefore, that as the intensity of the
attention is making gm, for the moment, the nest important text in the
Poe canon, and one of the most important for the study of
nineteenth-century literature, a comprehensive history of the response
to the work to the present would prove useful. At least it would
illuminate the development of the response through past and current
critical and scholarly contexts: hopefully, in the end it will
illuminate gm itself.

This study, then, brings to hear every published discussion of gm
I could locate, fran its initial publication in 1838 onward, toward the
aim of a survey and examination of how the book has been received. It
trill bring into relation the critical issues, priorities, and
cmclusions of successive generations, analyzing diachronically the

evolutions as they have unfolded over a century and a half; but it will

also cmpare the critical and scholarly statements within individual

 

‘

u)

generations, in the process scrutinizing assumptions of consensus,
continuity, and steady growth from ignorance to truth structurally
implicit in many critical histories of American writers. A secondary
aim will be to place m within the larger contexts of Poe studies and
studies of American literary historiography in general. Indeed, this
focus is inevitable, for a significant proportion of 3m commentators
thenselves have been doing one or the other.

American critical response will also be ccmpared at various
historical moments to several other categories of respondents: the
French, whose early and sustained enthusiasm for Poe included gym from
the beginning, and who have periodically generated original readings
that have proved saninal in Americans' perceptions; and secondly, the
American public response, which has been more consistently positive than
the critics' : from the second edition in 1856 on, it has never been out
of print. While it has never rivalled his better-known stories and
poems in popularity, nonetheless there has been almost always a variety
of available editions, including widely accessible cheaply printed
versions.

The objects of scrutiny in this study will be reviews, studies and
essays devoted exclusively to m, essays and books concerned with Poe's
work or life in general that offer some sort of reading of gm (or, in
sue cases, imply a reading of m), and works on American literature
that respond to gm. Moreover it must include nany that ignore or
briefly dismiss the book or its author; for a book on Poe's writing, for
instance, that says little or nothing of his longest and probably nest
caplet work obviously consitutes a response, and some of the most

liportant 'statanertts" are, for example, the loud silence on Poe in

L

4
F. O. Matthiessen's influential American Renaissance, and on M in
the current standard biography by Arthur Hobson Quinn.

At present, gym bibliography is hardly past the pioneer stage. As
a bibliographical treatise, this study identifies numerous articles and
book chapters on gm that have escaped notice in the small, fragmentary
bibliographic literature extant.1 It discusses and relates studies
far more extensively than these initial bibliographical essays do or

were intended to do.

2

The Text: Formal and Thematic Probl“

The response to m, in its extremity and variety, seems to suggest
a category of literature Carl Jung denaninated "the Visionary Made,"
into which he placed, for example, Blake's poetry and Joyce's Ulysses.
It is the reaction such literature generates, rather than the category
itself ,- that is of interest:
We are astonished, taken aback, confused, put on our guard or
even disgusted-4nd we danand cannentaries and explanations.
We are minded of nothing in everyday life, but rather of
dream, night-time fears and the dark recesses of the mind
that we sanetimes sense with misgiving. The reading public
for the nest part repudiates this kind of writing, and
literary critics are anbarrassed by it. (210)

Jung's list could be a gloss of the American scholarly reaction to £115,

 

5

though "repudiate" no longer applies. Frustration and uncertainty are
evident, as critics have atte'apted to contain a work that has remained
resistant.

The diverse reactions must be considered first as the natural
result of unusually complex and eccentric subject matter. Of course EVE
offers numerous riddles of the sort that Poe would later establish as
conventions of the detective story plot in the more famous stories of
Dupin and Legrand. Pym must solve such puzzles as reading Augustus's
cryptic note in the whaler's dark hold, decoding the strange language
and behavior of treacherous Tsalalians in time to save himself and
Peters, and deciphering the petroglyphs carved into the hill (though he
fails in nearly every such task he undertakes); and the story as a whole
takes the shape of a mystery, as the reader speculates along with the
"author" of the appended "Note" upon the whereabouts and the contents of
the concluding portion of the narrative, the means of Pym's escape from
the cataract, the undisclosed "natter relative to the Pole itself ," and
the waning of those petroglyphs, which vaguely offer thanselves as
mhow the key to great mysteries.

mt it is not merely a mystery or detective story, and there are
problem of less obvious intentionality almst too numerous to catalogue
that cmfront critics and other readers. A few examples illustrating
the range and character can be offered here. In the category of genre,
the work variously presents itself as (and critics have pronounced it
as) a work of juvenilia, a fictionalized but verisimilar travel
narrative (e.g., Robinson Crusoe), a fantastic or inaginary voyage

(e.g., Gulliver's Travels), a profound oneiric or psychological drama, a

 

A

6

bildungsronan, a parody of all these, a satire in the forms of allegory
and of anatomy, a hoax, and even an apocalyptic or prophetic writing.
And scholars find numerous other genres, including nonfictional forms,
anbedded in the narrative. Yet the text violates the conventional and
functional boundaries of every genre of which it seems to be an example.
Related to the indeterminacy of genre is a group of problems that
stem from the instability of the narrative itself, including the
narrative frame, structure, and subject. In most studies that address
the frame, one finds either implicit assumptions or explicit arglment
made about the significance of the relationship between the two chief
narrators, Pym himelf, and the "Mr. Poe," author of the first three and
one half chapters. Ostensibly, the preface, "by" Pym, stands as an
explanation for the first chapters' prior appearance in two issues of
the Southern Literiry Massaer the previous year, 1837, under the name
of "Poe." (This, of course, was true: Poe had published installments
in the January and February numbers while Assistant Editor there.) But
rather than ignore this potential confusion, or handle it in sone
inconspicuous way, Poe exploits it, drawing attention to the
relationship by accmulating layer upon layer of irony. Pym tells us he
was reluctant to tell his true story, certain that the "positively
marvellous" incidents will be taken as "impudent. . . fiction."2 We
are told that "Mr. Poe" believed the story when Pym first related it to
him, yet admits to having written the first part of the story under his
own mm, in his own words, and under the label of fiction. Ironically,
as Pym tells us, readers responded with credulity, precisely as
predicted by "Mr. Poe," who presents this as evidence that Pym may

 

7
"trust to the shrewdness and common sense of the public" to believe his
story (actually, to trust in the public's dullness, for it takes as
truth the chapters explicitly presented as fiction). Pym is thus
persuaded that despite his "uncouth" style, "the facts.. . [will] carry
with them sufficient evidence of their own authenticity."

In yet another ironic twist, we learn in the appended "Note" from a
third narrator, presumably another editor, that "Mr. Poe" will not
cooperate in supplying the missing information of the abortive
narrative, because he has changed his mind, and does not believe in the
"entire truth" of the later chapters. Thus we apparently have frcm the
real author an oblique, half-confession to his readers——after they have
read it--that the narrative is imaginary, and that he has hoaxed them.
In a final layer of irony, both the elaborate ruse and the confession
prove supererogatory, since both the convoluted preface and the
fantastic narrative are incredible on their face, just as Pym had
feared. Indeed, despite long-lived nnnors, there is no evidence that a
significant number of critics or other readers took it as a true account
(Pollin Imaginagy xv). Confusing rather than clarifying narrative
authority, the frame has been the subject of much discussion.

The narrative structure itself is problematic in a number of ways,
of which the most troubling-—and for mny readers annoying-must be the
mdden stop, in a narrative that is either atypically concluded or
sinply unfinished. However one reads the ending, it is certainly
mysterious, with respect to the events between the final journal entry
of March 22, 1830 on one hand and the writing of the Note and

publication of the narrative, in July, 1838, on the other. There are

some half-dozen oblique references to these eight and one half years,
and to a premised "subsequent portion of this narrative" which never
appears. We know that Pym spent these years on an extended Pacific
Ocean voyage on a vessel (never named), and that they were "crowded with
events" of the most "unconceivable character" (10.1 . We know also that
Pym dies suddenly, and that the remaining "two or three" chapters, which
had not yet been put to type, had been lost with him.

What we do not know, then, is his means of escape from nearly
certain death at the South Pole, as his canoe slips into the chasm; the
details of his Pacific voyage (except that he visits the Galapagos
Islands at some point, and there kills a tortoise with a four foot long
neck); and the circumstances of his "sudden and distressing death" in
1837 or 1838. Perhaps most disappointing, we never learn the identity
of the white shrouded figure. This is to say, we never discover the
great truth, scientific or apocalyptic, toward which the narrative moves
as in a crescendo: "one of the most intensely emiting secrets which
has ever engrossed" the "eye of scimce" (17.12).

A subject of even greater debate on narrative structure has been
its continuity or disjunctiveness. In a process seaningly unlike that
of any other text, even in the Poe canon, the narrative moves gradually
fran its own strict rules of verisimilitude to a 1.icense- for the.
bizarre and fantastic, introducing into the familiar world an alien
geography with unique features and physical principles, and alien lumen
and anilal forms. Readers have described the effect as confusing. Sane
cmtaries suggest the experience of disorientation or even vertigo,

as we me through different kinds of discourse, canpelled to employ

 

within one text a variety of interpretive strategies we would normally
use to relate to profoundly different kinds of texts (imaginary and
factual, fanstastic and verisimilar.)

A more specific focus of debate on structure has been the issue of
the apparent discontinuity between the phases of Pym's journey. Critics
rave pointed out in different ways that the narrative (or Pym himself)
has no manory. When an episode is complete, or before it is, the
narrative moves on, with little effort at accounting for loose ends or
at raking transitions. For example, the agonizing death of Pym's
dearest friend before his ovm eyes has no lingering emotional effect,
and fran the point of his death on, it is as if neither he nor their
relationship ever existed. Meanwhile the dog Tiger simply vanishes. 0n
the other hand, W. H. Auden asserted that "each [adventure] leads
credibly into the next," and called 13m ”an object lesson in the art" of
the adventure story (Carlson Rmition 222).

My problans cluster about the narrative subject, Pym himself, as
traveller and min narrator. Conventionally in the novel, the
relatively stable, unified identity of the narrator is the chief
centripetal force in the narrative process, which is constantly
threatened with disintegration by the dispersive forces created by its
own movement through tine, space or both. As unfamiliar encounters and
events mltiply, pressure increases in proportion on the narrator and/or
hero to assimilate the phenomena within a recognizable point of view;
mastheless we presume upon his ability to do so, and that his identity
will rennin stable, and his consciousness unified.

However nothing is stable about Arthur Gordon Pym. Wild swings in

10

point of view represent him at one point as an innocent adolescent
stowing away for a lark, and a scientifically educated adult, expert in
the history of acploration and South Sea natural history. In chapter
two Pym delights in such childish pranks as disguising himself as a
stranger to his grandfather; within six months he possesses the personal
authority to persuade Captain Guy against his better judgment to change
the ship's itinerary and steer for the pole (17.12).

Critics have frequently noticed that Pym has little sense of self
as the novel opens, in contrast for instance to Dickens's Pip, Oliver,
or David Copperfield, who though children innately possess a full range
of the best values of their society. Stranger yet, as some critics
point out, he never does develop a sense of self. Several of the myth-
and psychoanalytic readings even argue for a gradual diffusion of Pym's
ego, as Pym journeys back to either primrdial being or the wanb itself.
In any case, his character is peculiarly passive, in a form of
literature more or less predicated upon action, and oblivious and static
in one in which psychological developnent is usually the central
dynamic. Conspicuously absent is any interpretation by Pym during or
after his travels of his own experiences-Abe ghastly mortification on
the wrecked Grampus, the peculiar culture of the Tsalalians, the bizarre
natural plmomena. Often he describes these with the casualness of a
personality so empty or undeveloped as to be void of ecpectations, and
thus incapable of surprise. 'Ihis absence, together with Poe's refusal
to otherwise supply moral, anthropological, philosophical or even
geographical interpretation rakes for one of the most completely

indeterminate texts in American literature.

 

11

The rhetorical and stylistic irregularities have been a bottanless
source of interpretive problans. The most obvious is a persistently
overwrought language. Bloom might well have chosen m as his example
in dismissing the style of Poe's stories, which occasionally attain "a

badness not to be believed" (Tales 1). While in the Grampus hold, for

 

instance, Pym undergoes a range of emotions occasioned by unexpected
events—«despair at not hearing from Augustus, terror at being attacked
by a beast, relief that it turns out to be the dog Tiger, etc. Each is
described in hyperbolic language that seems at once to be ludicrous and
to flaunt its own inadequacy to represent primal emotional experience:
"I felt, I am sure, more than ten thousand times the agonies of death
itself"; "and 'M' too, that word of words...how chillily...did its
vague syllables [sic] fall.. .into the innermost recesses of my soul!"
(3.5, 3.9).

But in the area of rhetoric, a much" richer source of discussion has
been the polyglot of discursive voices, for the extravagant language is
only one of many juxtaposed voices. The language of juvenile adventure
literature, for instance, in the boy-and-his—dog and Stowaway subplots,
rendered fran a child's point of view, is followed by distinctly
unchildish graphic representations of the mutineers' butchery, and the
mrtifioetion, putrefaction and cannibalism in the scenes on the
floating wreck. Transposed against extravagant, extended descriptions
of irrational states of mindnterror, delirium, etc.-whic‘n are
ubiquitous, is a contrastingly sober scientific reportorial voice.
especially the middle and final portions contain detailed exposition in

such fields as geography, the history of exploration, and several areas

.7.

A

12

The rhetorical and stylistic irregularities have been a bottomless
source of interpretive problans. The most obvious is a persistently
overwrought language. Bloom might well have chosen EVE as his example
in dismissing the style of Poe's stories, which occasionally attain "a
badness not to be believed" (M 1). While in the Grampus hold, for
instance, Pym undergoes a range of emotions occasioned by unexpected
events-despair at not hearing from Augustus, terror at being attacked
by a beast, relief that it turns out to be the dog Tiger, etc. Each is
described in hyperbolic language that seats at once to be ludicrous and
to flaunt its own inadequacy to represent prinal enotional experience:
"I felt, I am sure, more than ten thousand tines the agonies of death
itself"; "and 'M' too, that word of words...how chillily. . .did its
vague syllables [sic] fall.. .into the innermost recesses of my soul!"
(3.5, 3.9).

But in the area of rhetoric, a much“ richer source of discussion has
been the polyglot of discursive voices, for the extravagant language is
only one of many juxtaposed voices. The language of juvenile adventure
literature, for instance, in the boy-and-his—dog and Stowaway subplots,
rendered fran a child's point of view, is followed by distinctly
unchildish graphic representations of the mutineers' butchery, and the
mrtification, putrefaction and cannibalism in the scenes on the
floating wreck. Transposed against extravagant, extended descriptions
of irrational states of mind—terror, delirium, etc.-which are
ubiquitous, is a contrastingly sober scientific reportorial voice.
Especially the middle and final portions contain detailed exposition in

such fields as geography, the history of exploration, and several areas

 

13

of natural history. Here again we find excess, in the form of a
mltiplication of detail, producing for example four pages of data on a
bird rookery on Kerguelen's Island. For trany readers this contributes
nothing but bulk and tedium, especially for the contauporary reviewers,
who tended to see the book as an adventure story. On the other hand,
recent readings are asserting significance to these digressions of the
sort that has long been recognized for instance in those of Mom-Dick.
mna Nelson, for example, has identified an elaborate allegorical
critique of colonialism in Pym's discussion of species' interactivity
within the rookery.

Yet another rhetorical transition is the rapid, unmarked intrusion
of fantasy into the "nonfiction" discourse. Poe insinuates imaginary
elements into the discussions of actual islands, past voyages, life
form, and peoples, in a flagrant disregard of the boundaries between
fact and fantasy. There is a corresponding rhetorical shift, in a
diminished concern for detail, reportage and credibility. We see Pym
casually accept and report wildly impossible phenomena and events—the
natives' black teeth, and nrbled ocean water, while abandoning his
quasi-scientific reportial style. Not only does a preposterously large
(15') bear appear from among the icebergs, but we also are asked to
imagine Peters singlehandedly killing it with a knife. Such a scene can
be visualized only in a fantastic (in this case, a caricatured) scene,
as indeed Peters himself must be, with his dog-fur wig, "indented"
skull, ear-to-ear lips, and "exceedingly long and protruding" teeth.

To round out this partial list of rhetorical voices, we might

nation the prophetic language dominating the final scenes, taking place

 

1.4

in the fantastic geography of the milky ocean, vaporous cataract, and
polar chasm. In a reverent style echoing the Book of Daniel and The
Revelation, Poe evokes a sense of divine portent, culminating in the
final sentence: "'Ihere 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 the snow."
As Ridgely describes it, the South Pole as an object of "scientific
quest," reflected in the geographical-historical discourse, becomes
intertwined with the image of the pole in the rhetoric of prophesy, "as
symbol of sane ultinate revelation of man's history and his fate" ("B’ld"
107) .

There are other sources of interpretive problens, such as the
function of the various cryptograms which never shed much light on
anything, the multitude of textual errors and discrepancies in the plot,
etc., all of which have fueled debate on the intention and care Poe'

invested in the novel.

3
The Criticiwu' Dynamics and Dimensions

Turning to the camlex, dynamic critical reaction 13m has
generated, at least two effects can be observed more or less
consistently over the hundred and fifty years since it appeared. The
lost striking is the. peculiar resistance to criticism M has
dominated from the beginning. “the effect has been, first and

 

MRI 19;.

15

foranost, a reluctance among many critics to speak conclusively or
substantively about it. This has been particularly true of biographers
and other camentators who may have found themselves obligated to say
scmething about 13m. We find that many have maneuvered to avoid the
questions involving the deepest levels of meaning in the work. They
have most frequently ignored it, even in Poe biography or studies of his
work, but also in studies of American literary history, the American
Ranance or novel, the American Renaissance, and other subjects to which
it would seem relevant on some ground. If not ignored entirely, it is
often briefly dimissed as experimental, trivial, or anmlous, or it is
discarded in the same breath with The Journal of Julius Rodnen as
unfinished work. Such camentators may limit their discussion to the
met rudimentary, generic commentary, often little mre than a brief
description of structure, a plot sunmary, or a recital of the few known
cunposition and publication facts.

Other forms of evasion are to gingerly write around it, effectively
hedging bets about whether, as John Carlos Rowe put it, 3"! is "a
mnunental bungle or a work of transcendent genius" (92). F. O.
htthiessen, for instance, calls m "merely the last word in adolescent
fanstasy," and later in the sane paragraph places it "on a kindred
level" with no less than The Rim of the Ancient Mariner and Molly-Dick
. ('Poe" 329). This remark, vague as it is, renders incomprehensible the
mission of gm in his American Renaissance, where it is not even
mentioned. A. H. Quinn too is ambiguous. In one of the few sentences
that might be construed as interpretive, he is both portentous and

vague: "When the details of the voyages have long been forgotten, the

‘

V i... s... 1n

16

picture of the mysterious figure remains, stimulating the imagination of
those readers who do not have to have everything explained to them in
words of one syllable" (266). In a book subtitled A Critical Biggraphy,
one would like to hear Quinn's explanation, even in multisyllabic words
if necessary, but none is offered.

This form of criticism often reflects rather than interprets the
ambiguity of the text itself. Julian Symns and Daniel Hoffman, for
instance, are thoroughly ambivalent. Symons scoffs at Harold Beaver's
description of m as a symbolistic spiritual odyssey, by downgrading
Poe's intention: "There is every indication that Poe began with the
idea of telling an adventure story, and that his love of puzzles, jokes,
tricks, took over near the end" (218). But later Symons himself offers
an apocalyptic reading that even outshines Beaver's: the "shrouded
hunan figure" is "the symbol of a new and pure world. It is a vision,
one might say, of the eventual state foreseen in m, when nan has
becale the Godhead" (219). In perhaps the archetypal case of
inconclusive criticism, Daniel Hoffman, in a book otherwise containing
my original insights into Doe's work, refracts into his own reading of
M nearly every extant interpretation. He variously claims for it
status as: an apocalypse, with its nihilistic conclusion a "simiacrum
of the apocalyptic end of man"; a hoax, in which annihilation is
followed by rebirth, in the form of Pym's return; a Jungian-organized
dram of archetypal projection; a Freudian reading of regression to a
wmb—like enviromnent and infantile personality (previously proposed by
French critics); and an allegory of the South and racism (264-77).

A second consistently perceptible phendnenon of the critical

+5171.

ans-'-

17

literature is diversity in approach and method, and dissensus in
conclusion. In the nautical language of Frederick Frank, in his
introductory remarks to his 1980 bibliography, "M's polarized Gothic
has now pulled a generation of Poe explorers into its elusive vortex;
and like Melville's white whale, m has been relentlessly pursued by. . .
a flotilla of specialists who have followed Pym into the warm, white
abyss" (117). In his excellent essay, Douglas Robinson succinctly
illustrates the range of critical possibilities in a novel with
"something for every critical taste," preferring inegery that hints of a
clothing store: M has
knotty textual problans for the text critic, rich parental and
sexual inagery for the Freudian, bold archetypal patterns for
the myth critic, the terror of encroaching disorder for the
existentialist, microsocieties in violent upheaval for the
mrxist, convoluted netafictional ironies for the
deconstructionist, and a powerful thrust toward transcendence
for the visionary. ("Reading" 47)

Related to the variety of approaches is the critiml dissensus, and
at tines disorder, that characterizes the response to 3m, perhaps an
extension of the same discord which has continued to revitalize the
genus of Poe criticism fran the beginning. In fact probably no Auerican
work has engendered disagreemnt at so many levels of critical and
scblarly concern-beginning with the question in the nineteenth century
of whether the work uerits current or even nention in any discussion of
Poe. What is imediately striking in this regard is the extrenity of

readings that have been offered, some of then nothing less than

 

fi--~" ~

18
eccentric. For acample, notice the range indicated in a few of the
opinions about the vague "human" figure Pym encounters at the pole: for
Edward Davidson, Pym travels back to the primordial universe; the figure
is "the center" of "that whiteness. . .beyond first things,"
simltaneously "ultimte reduction" and "ultimate illumination" (175-6).
For John Irwin, the white figure is Pym's own unrecognized shadow,
cipher of himself. For Walter Bezanson, it is the archetypal mother, to
which he has arrived "through a warm cosmic milk bath" (174) . For Tod
Lieber, it is the image of Pym's own imagination, which he embraces
instead of reality, and which saves him fran destruction by its
"creative power" (188). For Harry Levin, it is an angel, by whose
supernatural agency he is saved. For Charles O'Donnell it is an
illusion, for Pym has actually moved into the realm of ether, and for
Richard Kopley, the white figure is the figurehead of the whaler m
which he had encountered on his Ariel excursion, and which again saves
his life.

Part of the problem critics have had even speaking the sane
language about this text is the lack of what Douglas Robinson calls
"textual facts" (47). More than established scholarly facts (thanselves
in short supply with gm), textual facts refers to a consensus built up
over time about the meaning of certain basic features of a text. Such a
consensus establishes the boundaries within which debate occurs, and
serves as a built-in defense against 'extrene' readings. The lack of
textual facts about m has nade for a disorderly discussion, or are
precisely, numerous subordinate discussions in discrete critical

languages .

 

19
With respect to the disqualification of m, it is natural to

expect less to be said than by those who champion it. Why write much
about, or even read, a work of little merit? We have mentioned some of
the ways in which m has been dismissed; of derogatory critics of Poe
who do not even mention E‘fl we can infer either unfamiliarity with the
text, or, in sane cases, rejection as severe as any that is explicit.
In neny cases, we find that their grievances against Poe or his work
apply as much or more to 3m than to the examples they discuss. For
example, Eliot writes that he found in Poe "slipshod writing, puerile
thinking unsupported by wide reading or profound scholarship, haphazard
experinents in various types of writing, chiefly under pressure of
financial need, without perfection in any detail." He is writing about
Poe's work in general, and makes only the briefest mention of m (as a
probable influence on 11.6. Wells), yet he has articulated each of the
chief categories critics have used to condemn gym (205).

Whitman offers a damning moral critique of Poe, based on the
tendency of his poetry toward "morbidity, abnormal beauty," and "the
lush and the weird," qualities he would almst certainly find in
abundance in m (75). Yeats' analysis of "The Pit and the Pendulum"
disclosed nothing but "an. appeal to the nerves by tawdry physical
affrightments" (77). One can inegine a similar indictment of gm.
Winters -kes no enceptions to his condemnation of Poe's work as
antionally "obscure." Em might have a place beside the several
mentioned tales such as "The Black Cat" as "studies in hysteria" (195).
As creations of "auction for its own sake," they fail to neet the first

test of Winter's didactic aesthetic: They "can be of no aid to us in

 

fl

20
understanding ourselves or in ordering our lives, for most of our
experience is irrelevant to it" (195, 185).

m the other hand, my of those enthusiastic about Poe have been
strongly drawn to Pm, and have had much to say about it. A number have
granted it a prominent place in theories of American literature and
historiography, calling it a key formal influence or imbuing it with
archetypal status. Some regard it as Poe's greatest achievenent, while
more have care to see it as an integral part of the Poe canon, and,
despite its unusual length, of the short fiction. Many of the thenes he
experinented with in m would be exploited in later short stories:
death and dying, confinenent and entombuent, perversity, cryptography,
nedness, criminality, human contact with the abyss. One might go so far
as to suggest that gm is a kind of ur-text of the canon of Poe's short
fiction, though no critic has developed an analysis of the relationship
between the two.

Among those critics who praise PM there is as striking a lack of
consmsus as among those who denigrate it. Approbation involves widely
variant aesthetic criteria and theoretical assumptions behind than.
Critics who have pmised 13m for its craft tend to see the anomlous
structural and stylistic features as meaningful experimentation.

Charles Baudelaire and Gaston Bachelard in France, and Walter Bezanson
in Anerica were the first of many, for instance, to observe the original
narrative techniques Poe devised in rendering Pym's dreane. Paul John
akin, Stephen Donadio, Stephen Mainville, John Irwin, and others define
innovative narrative and structural strategies, while Richard Harp, John

Kinsey, and M. L. Rosenthal offer analyses of M's craft that

A

21

enphasize style as a strength, and suggest that Poe's experinentation
prefigured nedernist aesthetics. Malcolm Cowley called the final
paragraph the finest single passage in Poe's prose, while Allen Tate
singled out PM when he remarked that certain passages attain "a
lucidity and intensity" unsurpassed even by Swift ("Angelic" 39). Had
he cited an example, perhaps it would have been that remarkable
description of Pym's dream in the hold of the Grampus, from which we
take a fragment:
...Inlrense1y tall trunks of trees, gray and leafless, rose up
in endless succession as far as the eye could reach. Their
roots were concealed in wide-spreading nerasses, whose dreary
water lay intensely black, still, and altogether terrible,
beneath. And the strange trees seened endowed with a human
vitality, and, waving to and fro their skeleton arms, were
crying to the silent waters for mercy, in the shrill and
piercing accents of the most acute agony and despair. . . .
(2.12)

Literary artists have been among the first and the nest
enthusiastic in attributing aesthetic merit to 3!. They come frcm
every period and represent every type. Unconstrained by the pressure of
literary convention felt by many professional critics and scholars, they
seem unintimidated by a work they cannot daninate by analysis or
interpretive ingenuity. Implicitly disdainful of theoretical analysis,
the statements of W. H. Auden, Charles Swinburne and others reflect a
less questioning fascination for an engaging and original story. Others

have been awed by its imaginative sweep and power: Charles Baudelaire,

22

nest influentially, but also Vachel Lindsay, Henry Janes, Daniel
Hoffman, Richard Wilbur, and others. Writers as diverse as Melville, H.
P. Lovecraft, and, as T. S. Eliot suggests, Rider Haggard and H. G.
Wells were inspired to borrow from or imitate EVE- Increasing
discussion about Poe's influence on Melville has included considerable

discussion establishing M's influence on Mobv-Dick, Mardi, Pierre, and

 

 

m (See chapter five, note 2 below). In "Poe's Endless Voyage," Jules
Zanger discusses several novelists who have felt neved to "complete" 3m
in fiction of their own: Jules Verne in The Sphinx of the Icefields
(1895), a pseudo-scientific rendering; Charles Romyn Dake in A Strange
Discoveg (1897), a hoax presented as Dirk Peters' account, involving
pseudo-historical "lost races" beyond Tsalal; and H. P. Lovecraft in
A_t the Mountains of Madness (1931), a fantasy tying to Lovecraft's own
Cthtlhu Mythos. Similarly, Hanjo Berresem analyzes Tharas Pynchon's
appropriation of M neterials for y. (1963) in his "Godolphin,
Goodolphin, Goodol'phin, Goodol'Pyn, Good ol'Pym: A Question of
Integration" (1982). As David Ketterer has discovered ("Shadows"),
recent m influence study has concentrated on the Anglo-American
postnedern fiction and the Latin Anericen Modernisme (e.g., John Barth,
Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes), while Roberto

Cagliero has uncovered a wide influence on Italian literature.

 

4
Theoretical Prenises

Both the justification and the methodology for this critical
history is rooted in the theory of reception aesthetics. Appropriated
widely across the theoretical spectrum, including Marxist,
psychoanalytic, linguistic and semiotic critical theory, the aesthetics
of reception was first discriminated fran fornelist aesthetic theory in
the work of Hans Robert Jauss and Jan Mukarovsky, in their respective
departures from the Russian Formalist school.3 Both nen sought an
aesthetic that takes into account the social and historical function of
literature—-and concluded that these are its only functions. For Jauss,
traditional fornelist criticism is founded on an aesthetic of
representation. The text represents sane object in history, but is
itself a discrete object, unchanged by changing perceptions of it.
Criteria for artistic judgnent are applied to the text, on the
assumption that aesthetic value resides objectively and statically in
the literary object. Jauss postulated that the determinants of the
reception of a text, nest importantly the value it is assigned, are
located in the reading subject, unfolding from the dialectic between
what the reader expects to find-—the horizon of expectation--and what he
believes he does find. There is no value extrinsic to the reading
subject, whether that is an individual, a society, or a generation of
readers. Without extrinsic value, a text's value can be only relative
and variable, for aesthetic values are thenselves unstable.

In his early work in the 1930's, Mukarovsky went a step beyond this

in relativizing values. Refusing the notion of aesthetic value as a
23

fi

24
stable concept, he preferred to speak of how the aesthetic functions,
within the individual, between individuals, and within a culture. Until
the arrival of Foucault and post~Althusserian Marxists, no one had so
thoroughly inverted Kant's transcendent aesthetic realm, untouched and
untouchable by history. Aesthetic value, as he says, is not only part
of the social process, but reaches throughout society, and any object
nay for a time bear aesthetic value, or function aesthetically. His
basic principle, in fact, is that there is no fixed boundary between
aesthetic and extra-aesthetic value. As he puts it, "There are no
objects which, by virtue of their essence or organization would,
regardless of tine, place or person evaluating than, possess an
aesthetic function and others which, again by their very nature, would
be necessarily imme to the aesthetic function" (1-2).

Clearly he is not holding that there is no aesthetic experience
distinguishable from practical acperience. On the contrary, an object
functions nere or less aesthetically in inverse relation to the degree
of its extraesthetic utility: a painting, a piece of pottery or a
political speech has some balance or imbalance at the manent it appears;
and that balance certainly can shift over tine, for a variety of
reasons. (nice their usefulness is outlived, for instance, a speech or
pot might be regarded in a more purely aesthetic light. As an sample,
one might recall the fortunes of two very different nineteenth century
Anerican texts, a sentinental narrative poen, let's say, by Longfellow,
and a slave narrative, such as those by Frederick Douglass. Uhtil
several decades ago the former was held to have relatively pure and more

or less permanent aesthetic value, while the latter relatively low in

 

25

that regard; or, if it was supposed to possess any, it was shared by the
practical cause of abolition, initially, and historical study in
subsequent generations. In recent years they have precisely reversed
their positions. Sich a recognition of the nature of the relative and
fluid ftmction of the aesthetic may place in a nere comprehensible frame
the history of EVE! which has been even less stable in the ways it has
functioned aesthetically and extraesthetically, both diachronically and
contanporaneously. It is as important for us as it was central to
Mukarovsky to unburden ourselves of the Kantian notion that there is a
transhistorical truth about the aesthetic merit of 13m that critics have
found, missed, or advanced toward; and the Aristotelian notion that
their and our responses derive objectively fran the text itself, solely
or primrily.

Jauss has shed considerable light on determinants which also
condition interpretation. For the central paradigm in his early work,
Jauss applies to the reading process Karl Popper's axiun of scientific
nethodology: "A11 observation is conditioned by the horizon of
expectations of the [reading] subject" (qtd. in Jauss, "Literary" 180).
Popper postulated that it is through the failure of our expectations
that we "nuke contact" with reality, and so potentially advance
knowledge by negative neans. Jauss appropriates the horizon concept as
a paradigm for what conditions a reading. 'Ihus for Jauss, study of the
social praxis, for it conditions the reader's horizon, must accanpany
study of the literary tact. Literary history for Jauss was profoundly
dialectic, and he recognized that the very social natrix shaping the

reader's horizon, and the horizon itself, is constituted by previous

 

26
reading. The way in which a reader might experience a book about an
imaginary voyage to the South Pole, for instance, will be profoundly
influenced by what he or she already knows about the Pole, by what he
knows about an inminent actual expedition, and by other imaginary and
real voyages already read. These and many other factors form the
reader's horizon of expectations when he or she picks up the book.

But what concerned Jauss nere than the social impact on the
reception of a tact was impact in the other direction. At the sane time
his horizon shapes his reading, the book will nere or less alter his
horizon, affecting his expectation and interpretation when he, for
example, reads about the real expedition, when he picks up another
ineginary narrative or novel, and so forth. Jauss takes Popper's axiom
a step further, asserting that literature has the capacity to create new
aesthetic, moral, and other kinds of perceptions, which in turn
neterially shape social history, as in the creation of a new literary
form or aesthetic, or the destruction of an old one ("Literary," esp.
180-83). History, from this perspective, is an endlessly dialectic
cunplex of verbal discourse or written tarts shaped by extant texts and
shaping those yet to come. Subtracting the difference of terminologies,
Jauss was advancing satething similar to what, for instance, Foucault
was saying concurrently in his histories of the asylum, the prison, and
so forth: that history, knowledge, and truth itself have no existence
outside of the discourse which constitutes them as fields.

What distinguishes Jauss and Mukarovsky fran Foucault and
post-Althusserian Marxists is the forners' insistence on the relevance

of both directions of the dialectic between aesthetic values and

 

27
history, including and especially the socially formative function of

aesthetic values and norms. Jauss was consciously mediating between the
text-centered formlism which sought to insulate literary study from
history, and theory derived from social history and philosophy, which,

when it treats aesthetic matters at all, tends to focus on the way

aesthetic values are thanselves socially informed, or simply the way

they reflect society. He sought to achieve this by opening up the
closed author—text circuit into a triad including the receiver, with the
act of reception as the crucial point at which effect and impact are
realized.

In this systen, then, literature is conceived not as an object, but
as an event experienced by the reader. Literary history is not a series
of discrete literary facts surrounding texts and authors, masterpieces
and the masters. As Jauss puts it, "The endlessly growing series of
literary 'facts' that wind up in literary histories is merely left over
fran the process. It's only pseudo-history" ("Literary 1.66). Rather,
literary history is the changing experience of readers--their charging
influence, reception, and perception. The mechanism is similar to what
Raymond Williams called "inherent determination," in which developments
(for instance, the fate of a book) grow out of actual relations between
texts and amng readers in the social process (Williams ch. 2). Jauss
uses the analogy of the question and answer (which he has developed as
both the paradigm and title of a recent book), in which a text is seen
to function as possibly providing answers to relevant questions for its
contaqaorary readers, and in turn raising new questions (aesthetic,
philosophical, mral). Both functions alter the reader's horizon, and

history itself.

 

28

Unlike the reception- and reader-response theory of some of his
successors, Jauss's does not depend on a conception of a unified or
fixed consciousness of the reader. It is consciousness itself he is
conceptualizing in his term 'horizon,‘ which is no more than the
aggregate of the reader's perceptions and conceptions at a given mnent,
which condition his or her expectations. Change is an inherent
condition of Jauss's sense of horizon, which alters not only between
generations but fran moment to moment. In Jauss's description of an act
of reading, one can see how the horizon reflexively shapes/is shaped by
the act of reading:

A literary work, even when it appears to be new, does not
present itself as sanething absolutely new in an inforuational
vacuum, but predisposes its audience to a very specific kind
of reception by announcements, overt and covert signals,
familiar characteristics, or implicit allusions. It awakens
memories of that which was already read, brings the reader to
a specific antional attitude, and with its beginning arouses
expectations for the 'middle and end, ' which can then be
maintained intact or altered, reoriented, or even fulfilled
ironically in the course of the reading according to specific
rules of the genre or type of text. . . . A corresponding process
of the omtinuous establishing and altering of horizons also
determines the relationship of the individual text to the
succession of texts that forms the genre. The new text evokes
for the reader the ‘ horizon of expectations and rules

familiar from earlier texts, which are then varied, corrected,

29
altered, or even just reproduced. ("Literary" 167)
The text itself represents for the reader sane other horizon, to the
extent that it is an alien text or a tact from the distant past;
consequently the dialectic process lay in the interaction (in its
simplest form) between two horizons to produce a third, new horizon.

Jauss's method of aesthetic analysis, then, involves reconstruction
of the synchronic moment of a text's appearance. For literary history
this would involve recreating a series of changing synchronic manents.
He concedes that ultimtely the possibility of literary history depends
upon whether the horizon can be objectified, and this improbable
condition has been one of the chief criticisms he has born since his
groundbreaking early essays. But even the attempt would be superior to
literary history in which sane extrinsic set of standard principles,
whether Platonic, Aristotelian, Kantian, or sanething else, is applied
abstractly. (These would be relevant, but only in the way they operate
or are made to operate, not as an abstract standard.)

In fact, Jauss accepts and builds on Hans-Georg Gadamer's critique
of historicism: a past nnment cannot be reconstructed objectively,
because it cannot be isolated from the interpreter's own horizon: "The
reconstructed [accent] can no longer stand within its original horizon
because this historical horizon is always already enveloped within the
horizon of the present" ("Literary" 172). Inevitably, as Gadamer puts
it, "understanding is always the process of the fusion of these horizons
that we suppose to exist by themselves" (qtd. in "Literary" 172). If
leaning is produced dialectically then the elememts must be understood

relatively, for each is mediated by the other: the reader's

3O

consciousness is altered and in some treasure determined by what he or

she reads; yet a text can only be interpreted subjectively through the
reader's horizon at that moment. By extension, judging the work of a

Poe critic of another period entails reconstituting his or her horizon
(recognizing that this process is itself a constitution of our own.)

It is well beyond the scope of this study to recreate the series of
synchronic monents from the tine of M's appearance; 'or even to
reproduce a few of then. Yet many of the critical and scholarly
problems m has presented bear as much or more upon factors in the
critic's contemporary situation as upon the text of m; the environment
shapes the way, and even whether, critics approach 31g.

Stanley Fish illuminates this principle and illustrates one such
set of factors: the lateral institutional pressures brought to bear on
successive generations of critics as they read Milton ("Transmting").
What he examines specifically is the integration, around the
mid-twentieth century, of the atypical and problanatic Books XI and XII
into the criticism of Paradise Lost. While critics assume continuity
and growth of understanding, and, implicitly, that they see clearly
unlike their predecessors, Fish shows that the change in the status of
XI and XII rather reflected a change in academic norms. Entrenched
principles of New Criticism encouraged critics to overlook these two
final books for their looser form. Scholarship of the time even
questimed their authenticity. The rehabilitation of this material
occurred with a change in accepted critical criteria: historical
criticism integrating theology, and archetypal criticism both of which

found the final two books relevant and integral.4

‘

 

31

Fish argued that literary history nnst regard art works as "products"
as well as "objects" of critical activity, and that each generation
reads and reconstitutes a text on the basis of its own assumptions and
criteria. I have suggested that m violates the rules of every
discursive form in which it presents itself, or which it introduces.
me pattern we will find in the criticism is a critic or scholar seizing
upon gm to advance a particular critical or historical program,
based on particular critical assumptions, whether of Poe, American
writing, or critical theory, only to find elements within the text
undermining the very stance it seened to support. G. R. Thompson was
the first to suggest the double significance in the ironic prose of Poe:
that a philosophical, psychological, or scientific statement is
simultaneously offered positively and ironically (Poe's Fiction 9).

Readings of m must be understood in relation to the context from
which they grow, as lunch as in relation to the text itself. A reading
will stand in sane positive or negative relation to current mainstream
or elite views of American literature, Poe, and film itself. Sometimes
"mainstream" will mean one prestigious essay—Griswold's on Poe's life,
Bonaparte's on Poe's wor‘:, Patrick Quinn on gig-which shapes the
discourse of a decade or more. Probably the most significant lateral
pressure on m critics are prevailing attitudes in America toward Poe
and his body of work.

Influencing these attitudes, in turn, has been the French
criticism While reaction has always been extensively delayed, neasured
in decades, most developments in Poe and gm criticism in America have

been anticipated in France. This pattern has been remarkably consistent

32

for a century and a half. Charles Baudelaire's enthusiasm for Doe never
produced the cult here, even briefly, that it produced there as a
permanent establishnent, where Poe has been recognized as a founder,
through Baudelaire's own mediation, of modern French symbolist poetics,
both by his theory and his original genius. On the other hand, his
claim that the "new literature" founded by Poe lay in his deep probing
of psychological, moral and nental process would be picked up --albeit a
century later-~in sane of the earliest serious American critics of Poe,
such as Tate, Eliot and Edmund Wilson. Original, enthusiastic studies
of aspects of Poe's work by French poets and theorists were to mark out
territory that would become fields of American study of Poe: in the
nineteenth century Stephane Mallarme's camentary and translation of the
poetry as coherent and disciplined and in the early twentieth Daul
Valery's essays arguing for the original integrity of Poe's aesthetic
theory.

mrie Bonaparte's psychoanalytic study appeared in 1933,
articulating in perhaps the nest exhaustive psychoanalysis of any artist
the first thorough account of the elusive quality of Poe's work. Gaston
Bachelard's scattered cmuents in the late thirties on Poe's fiction
fran the then-unique theoretical perspective of alchemy and
dream-consciousness may have contributed to the body of Jungian- and

myth-related criticism. Jacques Lacan's 1956 "Le Seminaire sur 'La

 

Iettre volée'", (translated in 1972 as "The Seminar on "the Purloined
Letter” and Derrida's reply, "Le facteur de la vérité" (1975;
translated as "The Purveyor of Truth" (1975) were at the front end of

the importation of poststructural theory from France, and sparked an

t

33
ongoing debate here. Beyond this, these two essays can he said to be

the saninal forces in a drastic reconfiguration of a mainstream
of American criticism of Poe; more so than of other American writers.
Whether the French response is taken as a whole, or individually, it
seaus inevitable that the sheer prestige lent to Doe in the attention he
has received Eran the French giants of poetry and theory has had a
positive impact on Poe's status in the American acadazty.5

Though this study groups critical statements according to issues
they entail, and, to a certain extent, according to ideological
orientation and critical strategy, it is not structured strictly on a
'schools' principle; and though it will begin with the
nineteenth-century reaction and end with the current deconstructionist
studies of Poe, neither will it be a strictly chronological account.
Rather, drawing fran both, it will attanpt to avoid certain assumptions
inherent in strict adherence to either structural principle. A
structure based on critical approaches tends either to assume or to
create the illusion of determinate boundaries between approaches, and
relative consensus within those boundaries. cm the other hand, strictly
chronological histories tend to place the literary work or the critical
statanent in sane context of continuity, suppressing elanents of
discontinuity which might threaten the historian's thesis. lbreover,
strictly chronological sequence often implicitly assumes a more or less
steady progression from ignorance to the truth about the meaning and
significance of the work. Both sets of assumptions, fallacious in
general, prove exphatically so in the history of m criticism: sate of
the pioneering studies in the nineteen-fifties, for instance, rennin

mung the most insightful ever made.

 

5

Chapter Overview

Chapters will be structured on the basis of issues and concerns
entailed in the studies. The idea is to involve chronology, critical
strategy, and ideology as three coordinates relating critical texts to
one another, at the same time minimizing the totalizing tendency of any
one of than alone.

Chapter Two covers approximately the first hundred years of the
critical history of m. This period is narked at one end by M's
initial publication by Harper's Brothers on July 17, 1838, and at the
other by the camenceuent of recognition and discussion of the work as
worthy or interesting by a mmber of influential American voices. We
turn first to the thirty known contenporary reviews of m. The
reviewers made little attanpt at interpretation or evaluation according
to criteria of high art, focusing more on its prospects for popular
success. Rarely do they offer a judgment more profound than that m is
delightful, interesting, pleasant, tedious, or disappointing.

Beyond the contemporary response, we examine the subsequent one
lumdred years, a period in which Poe's status was problamtic and marked
by serious reservations. The chapter gives an account of the brief, often
perfunctory treatment of 3m in early Poe biography and scholarship; and
then examines the ambivalent, complex response to gm of two early
mdern figures figures, Henry James and T. S. Eliot.

But the factor which conditions each of these latter two groups of

responses more than any other is Poe's own reputation, a subject which

34

h

35

perforce becomes the dominant one in this chapter. Since his poetry,
short stories, and criticism made him one of the most famous literary
names in America by 1945 (with the popular success of Tales of the
Grotew. and Arabegge and The Raven and Other Posts that year), and
since his work steadily if slowly grew in stature over this period, the
almst total silmce on m requires scrutiny. The analysis focusses
upon the factors surrounding the public perception of Poe and his work.
The popular image was of a dissolute, wild, and more or less irrational
artist, an image shared and fostered by the many literary
professional-editors, critics, writers--who had been stung in personal
association with Poe, particularly his critical pen. Long after his
death they perpetuated his reputation as, variously, a drug addict and
drunk, a ran of mrally unsound character, and a trivial,
sensationalistic artist—a "jingle-nan," in Emerson's phrase. The
biography reinforced a moralistic tendency to identify Foe with his own
pathological characters.

mile Poe's reputation was related to a variety of interlocking
extrinsic causes, there is certainly cause with the writing itself for
the widespread dismissal of Poe as a serious artist, as measured by the
aesthetic values and literary norms of the early nineteenth century. In
a colonial culture so intensely religious that its own literature
almst begins and ends in forms of religious expression, didactic and
moral sentiment inevitably became powerful, shaping principles of
post-colonial literature; similarly, a nation whose founding political
doe-ants and institutions were conceived within an Bilightemnent and

anpiricist framework will unsurprisingly exhibit a bias toward rational

 

36

elatents in literature. Indeed, it may be that the very
violence of Poe's critical pen is an index of the difficulty in
this culture of the task of liberating the imaginative literary work
fran contingency. Much of the nineteenth century resistance to
Poe in general as well as gym may lay in the ways in which he
subverted the traditional bases of authority, and the dense lexicon
of literary conventions by which the writer reassured his or her readers
of his/her fidelity to them. The few proponents of the autonomous
literary inagination in America, such as Irving, Brown, and Hawthorne,
did so only furtively and ambiguously; only‘Poe‘preached this
principle unreservedly in his criticis, and practiced it in his
art.6

gm itself exauplifies perhaps more than any nineteenth-century
text the autonany of the imagination, as Pym floats away fran New
England, the perceived heart of moral authority, beyond the very bounds
of the 'real' world. His narrative challenges the most axiomatic
structures of our self-identity, as he moves from the known world to an
unknown, frcm the real to the surreal, and beyond the established
boundaries of moral, rational and empirical authority. This ideological
rebelliousness my explain why nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
critics in particular have responded negatively to 3m.

mapter three examines the lines of gm criticism that are oriented
by a psychological approach. This is a wide-ranging category, including
any reading that finds symbolized meaning referring to an unconscious
realm, whether personal or collective. It mrks a watershed, in two

senses: it was the first to identify mltiple levels of meaning; and

 

37
secondly, it was the first to recognize that redness and death,
dissolution of mind and body, are at the thanatic core. As such, it has
provided a mechanism for confronting what so many critics before and
since have sought to avoid, the perverse behavior of Pym and the
disturbing anxieties, aggression, and morbidity that circulate through
the text.

It is the daninant approach to follow the biographically-oriented
criticism discussed in chapter two, and can be seen as an extension of
the same logic, for it holds Poe and his texts in roughly the same
relation: the key to understanding Poe's wor‘: is Poe himelf, with
particular reference to mental soundness or psychological percipience.
The early, cruder Freudian studies reduced the author and his text to
the same approximate configuration: the critic is analyst, Poe is
patient, and the text is a set of symptntic data, treated as an
analogue of the analysand's transcript of a dream or a session. later
approaches revised this to see Poe or his narrator as the analyst,
restoring the psychic or familial order which the story's antagonist has
destabilized. New Criticism-influenced studies that incorporate
psychoanalytic materials into allegorical interpretations prioritize
form over analysis of latent content, and constitute a substantive,
second category. They see Poe as consciously representing psychic laws
and processes, especially in a disintegrative trajectory. Though
Jungian archetypal criticism is often treated as a separate category,
such of it is based upon the same assmuptions and logic as
psychoanalytic criticism, as Jungian analytic theory itself is

fmdamentally-derivative of Freud. Those myth readings that see m as

 

38

a visionary text inaging a model of the divine rather than the
unconscious are treated under the subheading of Rananticism in chapter
five.

With the exception of Allen Tate, the leading New Critics had
little to say about Poe. As New Criticism began to influence and shape
formal study of fiction, m began to attract attention, in the
nineteen—sixties and -seventies. Chapter four examines the discourse
that emerged in this period involving M's merit on the basis of formal
and technical criteria. Debate developed about its genre
classification, and about internal fornal issues involving structure,
style, symbolism irony, and narrative issues. Doubt about its
seriousness and integrity as a unified whole, and about whether it even
merited analysis, fornal or thanatic, retained a substantial position in
the debate. These doubters found a good deal of supporting evidence in
the substantial scholarship being done at this time. Source study,
which had daninated the 3m cmmentary in Poe biography since the late
nineteenth century, mved into high gear, and the contention that the
narrative was little more than a pastiche of scores of pretexts, was
being corroborated in detail. (Indeed, Burton Pollin has found that as
much as a fifth of it is copied verbatim or close paraphrase [Kopley
ME 95]). Additionally, important caupositional studies reconstructed
the writing process, again supporting doubters by finding the narrative
to have been written in fits and starts over three years, comprised of
anywhere fran two to four "narratives" jerry-rigged together to make a
marketable book.

that unites these intrinsic textual analyses, genre studies, and

39
scholarly studies is their attempt to contain and regulate a seaningly
irrational text by the accumulation of fact, within and/or around it.
The studies advance models of order based on internal relationship of
its elatents, or by embedding the text in a larger contextual frame of
genre or biography, or both.

Chapter five examines studies that historicize M- Like those of
chapter four, they seek to align 3m within a larger context, but the
contextual frame is not an abstract systan of poetic values, but a
cultural or intellectual theory. The central, implicit question they
seek to resolve is: what is, or should be the status of gm in the
Merican literary tradition, or in literary or philosophic Rouanticis?
In examining their answers, we must ourselves ask how the differences
2m represents are dealt with, for the potential threat posed by any
incongruous text to a totalizing theory. For it is clear that in these
approaches, as much as any, we can see gm appropriated for agendas
camarehending far more than one text; elucidation of the text is a learn,
not an end. It is often engaged in a mutual relationship with the mdel
within which it is situated. Em acquires meaning and merit by its
association with the model, which it helps to make coherent by its
support as an example. For m we find two daninant traditions
relevant: First, American literary historiography, which from its
beginnings in the early twentieth century has sought to define a
distinctly American literary tradition, identifying uniquely American
cultural and historical patterns, and distinguishing American "myths."
Particularly with the development of a 'dark' tradition theory, which

perceived a dcminant subversive impulse and a Gothic literary form, gm

 

40
gained an increasingly prominent place. Secondly, and related to this
project, Americans sought to situate Eym_along with other American texts
within the western intellectual tradition, particularly international
literary and philosophic Romanticism.

The final chapter concerns readings that perceive Poe to be a
.modern writer or a precursor of modernism, including poststructural
readings. The explosion of interest in Poe in the eighties and nineties
correlates with the establiShment of language-focused deconstruction
theory. He has come to be seen as the ridhest mine in American
literature for revealing the crisis of language at the core of modern
experience. And of Poe texts, M has proven to be one of the most
interesting to critics. The ridh fund of textual, structural, and
stylistic irregularities which until recently were regarded as flaws in
a writer working outside his natural media, have cone to be seen as
deliberate and meaningful cannent. A number of critics of Poe focus
upon his deconstruction of the relationship between word and thing, or
language and meaning, by exposing the futility of the quest for an
original presence. It has sealed to than to be richly ironic and
self-referential, folding back upon itself to cannent upon its own
textuality, raising questions about the very fictive, linguistic, and
cognitive structures that constitute it; calling attention to its own
complex performance; and questioning its own proffered grounds of
authority.

Among the contributions of the poststructural readings is a frame
that allows for the wider play of signification Poe indulges in.

Critics have suggested a surprising array of techniques by which Poe

41

raises issues of language and selfhood. He depicts the void of language
by imaging the abyss. He violates the fictive veneer of his text so
painstakingly constructed in the Preface by depicting the authorial self
penetrating his own text, in the form of "Mr. Poe," hidden signatures
(such as the petroglyphs,) and self-reflexive metaphors of script and
scripting blurring the boundaries between text and world, and
deconstructing the illusion of the transparency of the word.

Questions involving selfhood are inevitably insinuated in this
framwork. Perhaps the best reading to date is John T. Irwin's
American Hiergglyms (1980), which analyzes the constitution of
consciousness in writing, selfhood emerging out of the
mutually-constitutive opposition of doubles: a perceiving, recognizing,
writing self and his/her text, the written self, or double by which
self-recognition and consciousness occurs. Dennis Pahl describes a
struggle between the two scripted selves, Pym and the "Mr. Poe"
inscribed 'by' Pym, for mastery and presence, each futilely striving to
'discover' themselves outside of the textuality that is inaged
everywhere, in notes, cryptograms, and the textualized landscape of
petroglyphs.

Frank Lentricchia postulates that American Deconstructionists have
fundamentally misunderstood Derrida in focusing upon the abyss within
the text rather than the historical traces, the retensions and
pretensions that surround the text and link it too the intertextual web
of which it is a part (New Criticin173-74, etc.). The nineteen
eighties saw a renewed interest in the historical and sociological

readings which, while sharing basic deconstructionists' recognition of

at

V.

0“;

V..-

 

42

the linguistic constitution of meaning, broaden the frame to seek to
understand the cultural determination. Gerald Kennedy, Dana Nelson,
Irwin and others offer richly intertextual readings that provide a depth
and authenticity beyond the temporally abstracted deconstructions.
Moreover , this approach takes them beyond the question of the
transparency of language to philosophic, aesthetic, and social questions
gm poses, involving for instance the ideologies of death (Kennedy), and
of race and colonialism (Nelson); the German Idealist appropriation of
the Arabesque pictoral form (Thompson); the extant body of popular
literary forms conflated in 2113 (David Reynolds); Poe's use of the
Hegelian dialectic (Evan Carton), and his rewriting of Lockean
enpirici- and Edwardsian theology (Joan Dayan), to name a few. Many of
these last-mentioned are discussed in other chapters, but they are of
recent vintage, and they demonstrate that M criticism remains as
varied and as vital as in any period.

Finally, an afterword discusses overall patterns and trends that

have emerged .

Notes

1 What does exist has been done well. This includes three
reports by Pollin discussing contemporary reviews he has uncovered:
Frank ("Polarized") and Robinson ("Reading"), both covering 1950-1980;
and Ketterer ("Tracing"), covering 1980-1989. See the latter fine essay
and list for dissertations and international studies.

2Preface.1. Quotations fran 13m are from Burton Pollin's T'_hg_
Imaginary Voyages: The Narratirve of A_rthu; Gordon Pym, The Unmlleled
Adventure ojf One Hans Pfaal_1, The Journal of Julius Rodman, vol. 1 of
The Collected W_ritings of Edgar Allan Poe, 4 vols. to date. (Boston:
Twayne, 1981-) 53-363. To facilitate use of other editions, Pollin's
notation system will be used, referring to chapter number and paragraph
number, divided by a period. References to gm's "Preface" or "Note"
will use those words. Two chapters of the first edition of BL“! were
mmbered 23, and will be referenced as 23A and 238, following Pollin.
Citations of Poe's nonfiction will refer to G. R. Thomson, ed., 3519a;
Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, Library of America Ser. (Literary
Classics of the United States, Inc., New York: 1984). Citations to
Poe's poetry and short fiction will refer to Patrick Quinn, ed., Egg;
Allan Poe: Poetgy and Tales, Library of America Ser. (Literary Classics
of the United States, Inc., New York: 1984).

3See especially Jauss "Literary History" and Qgestion and Answer,
and Mukarovsky Aesthetic Function. My discussion of both men's views are
drawn largely fran these two works.

4In fact, Fish's thesis goes beyond this: Lewis, he argues,
perceived the value of XI and XII on the basis of archetypal content not
then acceptable in academic circles: but ranaining judiciously quiet
about this, he defended Paradise Lost as a whole on the basis of
contemporary New Critical principles, contributing to the rehabilitation
of the poem and thereby creating the possibility of an eventual
reconciliation of XI and XII with the remainder.

5For discussion of the French response to Poe, see Patrick Quinn,
the most thorough and influential such study in English, and Jean
Alexander, which in addition to providing many docnments in translation,
includes an extensive discussion of the French perception of Poe and his

work. See also Jefferson Humphries, Metamoghoses of the Raven:

Literary Overdeterminedness in France and the South Since Poe (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), which opines that the

sense in which Poe's work reflects the social crisis of the antebellum
South that would culminate in war and disintegration, is the sense in
which be appealed to post-Revolutionary France. Donald Pease also makes
insightful cannents along this line in chapter five of Visionary

43

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44

Comcts. Unlike Alexander and Humphries, Quinn deals extensively with
gm, in addition to the stories. He sees the perennial appeal of Poe for
the French to be his "power, the extent of which he scarcely knew
himself, to bring up to the surface of consciousness the kind of
suhnerged emotional life that the intelligence prefers to ignore." This
interest in psychological "profundities," he surmises, led to
Baudelaire's attraction and the psychological-oriented explorations of
Bonaparte and Bachelard. Fatal Destinies is the most complete English
translation of Baudelaire's writing on Poe. Mallarmé's "Notes to the
Poems of Poe" (pp. 215-18), and Valéry's "On Eureka" (233-43) are
reprinted in Alexander.

Other important poststructural studies by French critics besides
Lacan and Derrida are those of Jean Ricardou, Maurice Lévy, Maurice
Mourier, and Roger Asselineau. Lacan's essay, Derrida's reply, and
American responses have been reprinted in Muller. See also Jeffrey
Mehlmn, "Poe Pourri: Lacan's Purloined Letter," Aesthetics Today, ed.
Morris Philipson and Paul J. Gudel (New York: New American Library,
1980), 413-32; Claude Richard, "Destin, Design, Dasein: Lacan, Derrida
and 'T'he Purloined Letter, "' Iowa Review 12 (1981), 1-10; and Donald
Pease, ”Marginal Politics and 'T'he Purloined Letter': A Review Essay,"
Poe Studies 16 (1983), 18-23.

6See Bell, esp. chs. 2 and S; and Porté, Romance, ch. 2.

Chapter Two
"We Do Not See Any Good End in Such Descriptions":

Abral Censure and the First Hundred Years

Context

The contemporary attention to The Nargtive of Ar_th_u_r Gordon Pym is
appropriate to begin with for at least two reasons in addition to its
chronological priority. First, Poe's substantial reputation as a poet
and short fiction writer would not exist til the mid-eighteen forties.
an the other hand, while he had already becmne well known as a sharp,
often vicious critic from his post at the Southern Literagy Mesgggr
from- 1835 to 1837, he had yet to accumulate the enmity among influential
literary figures in New York, Boston and Philadelphia that would ruin
his reputation for decades beyond his death. Since practically
everything written about Poe's work in Amrica after 1845 (and for about
a hundred years thereafter) is colored in sane way by his personal or
professional reputation-0ften narshalled as either an attack on or
defense of the man himself—the contemporary notice of his early work
provides the first and last opportunity to examine reaction more or less
to the writing without the writer. But if we are free of his personal

and legendary notoriety for the moment, the briefest look at the reviews

45

46

Shows that there were a good many other extratextual elements just as
firmdy shaping that response.

The most important of these is the set of expectations generated by
the literary environment within which 225 took its place. The second
reason to begin with contemporary notice, then, is that Pym for the most
part was accepted or rejected for what it seems to project itself as.

It was received in the context of the nonms of the popular modes of
whidh it appeared to be an example, unclouded by the later theoretical
issues surrounding canonization of gym as a great American book, or
Poe's relation to the American masters. Interestingly, once Poe's slow
redemptian from the cultural near-oblivion to which his contemporary
literary establith consigned him was canplete, M's 20th-Century
rediscovery also would be on popular criteria:‘w. H. Auden in his
decisive American reintroduction of the novel in 1950 praised it as an
“adventure story" with "interest, excitement, terror... in whidh every
kind of adventure occurs—u . . shipwreck. . . nutiny. . . strange
natives... supernatural nightmare events" (Carlson Rgggggition 222).

In many respects gym resanbles numerous cmrcially successful
narratives of voyages of exploration, naval expedition, trade, whaling
and mussionary activity in what was still in large part a sea-oriented
society. The title alone indicates the sensational appeal Poe intended,

whatever else he intended :

47

'IHENARRATIVE

OF

ARTHURGORIXNPYM

OFWKET

CG'iPRISIM} THE DETAILS OF A MUTINY AND ATROCIOUS BUTCHERY
ONMARDTHEAI'ERICANBRIGGRNIHJS, ONHERWAYTO

THE SOUTH SEAS, IN THE MONTH OF JUNE, 1827

WI'I'HANWPOFTIERECAPPUREOFMVESEBYM
SURVIVORS; 'H-lEIR SHIPWRECK AND SUBSEQJENT HORRIBLE
SUFFERIINBSFRCMFAMINE; THEIR DELIVERANCEBY
MEANSOFTHEBRITISH scuoowm JANE GUY: THE
mIEFCRUISEOF'I‘I-IISIATI‘ERVESSEINTHE
ANTARCTICOCEAN: HERCAPTURE,ANDTHE
MASSACREOFHERCREWWA
WOFISIANDSIN'I‘HE

rim-mm PARALLEL (F W LATITUDE:

WWMIBEREDIMWPURESAND
DISCOVHIIES
mmswm

TO WHICH THAT DISPRESSIM; CALAMITY GAVE RISE

48

The appeal to the popular taste for adventure, disaster, violence, the
prurient, and the exotic could not be more explicit. The similarity to
the title of one of the most popular sea adventures, that of Samuel
Woodworth, for instance, is illustrative. Em's own publisher, Harper
and Brothers, brought it out in 1832 under the pseudonym Benjamin
Morrell : The Narrative of Four Voxages to the Sogth Sea, North and South
Pacific Ocean‘ and Antarctic Ocean, Chinese SeaI Ethiopic and Southern
Atlantic Ocean; and Antarctic Ocean. From the yea_r; 1822 to 1831.

musing the Account of some valuable Dijsficoveriesy including the

Massacre Islandsz where thirteen of the Author: 5 Crew were massacred and
eaten by Cannibals.

However, the indications are that despite its large publisher and
fairly wide notice, 3m did not enjoy the narket success of Woodworth's
and many others' sea adventure narratives. One of the few known
docnnnents in either Poe's or Harpers' correspondence pertaining to M's
narket performance is an 1839 letter in which Harpers tells Poe that
less than one hundred copies had been sold in America. It also reported
that it was "inclined to believe" the book sold better in England, on
the basis of the sale of one hundred copies they sent to London.1 Two
editions appeared there, one by Wiley 8. Putnam in 1938, the sales of
which were good enough to require a reprint, and a cheap, pirated
edition in "The Novel Newspaper," in 1941 (Pollin, "Bibliography" 100).
Moreover, the English reviews tend to be more favorable, longer, and

more penetrating than the American reviews.

2

The Contemporary Notice

In a series of articles in the nineteen-seventies Burton Pollin
corrected the long-held assumptions that gym was little noticed by
contemporary reviewers, and that the few who did received it poorly.
Killis Campbell, in his 1933 discussion of Poe's contemporary reception
cited only three, and as late 1967 Sidney Kaplan stated unequivocally
that gym was "almst totally ignored by reviewers," and cited a single,
entirely hostile review (146). Research by Pollin and several others
has uncovered nineteen American reviews and announcements, in addition
to the three Campbell mntions, and six in British periodicals.2

The claim to wide notice, however, mst be tempered by the fact
that fourteen of these are in newspapers, and most of these are little
more than announceents. As I. M. Walker points out, few periodicals
could entirely ignore a book brought out by one of the largest firms in
the country. Moreover, while Harpers was capable of disseminating a
relatively large number of review copies, a number of notices seen to
have been based on little more than perusal of the title page, and
appropriation of its language. A key truth revealed by both the content
and location of the reviews confirms that m was largely received as it
seens to offer itself, as a form of sensational entertainment: and it
was noticed mostly by popular or general interest magazines of wider
circulation, the only exceptions being the more highbrow m and key!
York Review. The brief notice of The Sunday Morning M, of August 5,
1838, typifies the way many reviewers perceived M's function: "[Tlhe

49

50

lovers of the nervellous will have a fine treat for a sumnnner's day in
its perusal" ("Snowden" 33).

Recent scholarship has concerned itself with ways in which American
literature is rooted in and derived from the inmnediate cultural context
fran which it is so often abstracted. In this mission, David Reynolds
conceives his Beneath the American Renaissance as a "connnplement" to the
work of F. O. Matthiessen. Insofar as The American Renaissance
establishes the lines of influence upon American writers of European
classical literature, from Homer to Coleridge, Reynolds analyzes the
energence of the same set of Anerican classics from contemporary
Anterican culture, focussing upon the products of the new, burgeoning
popular press. Many of the American 'classics,' he mintains, emerge
out of crosswinds of influence fran a variety of popular modes, while
sane, like m, are actually part and parcel of the popular press in
several of its forms. largely working with the traditional canon he
inherited from Matthiessen ' 3 generation, Reynolds stops short of
assigninng m canonical status, calling it a "failure" and devoting only
about me page to it. Its interest for him lay in its rich intercourse,
along with most of Poe's fiction, with popular modes, and in that
respect it is among the purest illustrations of Reynolds' overall
thesis.

(he of the most important factors among the conditions surrounding
the appearance of m that give neaning to the contemporary responses is
the wave of econanic transformtion which American society as a whole,
and the literary world in particular, were experiencing at that

manent.3 What is relevant here is the industrialization of printinng

51

and the connnercialization of public writing, between approximately 1820
and 1860. Prior to this, books were read and written by a small number
of culturally "elite." As late as 1830 there were very few writers
sustaining themselves by writing, and as Michael Gilmore points out,
only 109 books of fiction were produced by Americans in the preceding
decade. In the 'forties there were over a thousand, in a market that
could, for instance, provide Uncle Tom's Cabin (1.852) with a sale of
350,000 copies in its first year (4). Michael Gilmore, Karl Polanyi and
others describe factors that contributed to the rapid commodification of
literary products on a historically unparalleled scale.4

During the sane period American letters went through a qualitative
transformation as great as the quantitive change in the literary market.
The sensationalization of journalism and nnost other kinds of
mass—produced literature was not only concurrent with the explosion of
the nerket, but in any analysis inextricably linked to it.
Characterized by .lurid treatnent of, such subjects as remarkable trials
and criminals, discoveries or adventures at sea or in the west,
discoveries in the sciences or such 'pseudosciences' as spiritualism
mass-produced literature tapped the popular tastes. Fiction, imitating
journalism, and hoping to imitate its success, emerged in every
journalistic format, as well as traditional onnes, from articles in the
penny newspapers and cheap magazines, to pamphlets on remarkable crines ,
to cheaply-produced novels .

An early example of a mass-appeal news magazine, cited by Reynolds,
illustrates the directions of current public taste: m Anerican Book of

Wonders and Marvellous Chronicle (1809). Among its 'news' items we

52

recognize material Poe would tap for Em and other pieces: cannibalism,
extrene suffering, bizarre creatures, live burial, ghosts, a raven with
human speech and intelligence, and an ape running loose in New York with
a pair of scissors (173). The most remarkable point Reynolds
establishes, and one quite significant from the standpoint of gym
criticism is not the rich textual, structural, and imaginative debt Poe
owes to contenporary literature--the contemporary reviewers thenselves
make that point—but the fact that the most shocking, brutal and
revolting scenes which seened to set 13m apart, and do set it apart from
the Renaissance literature that has endured, were typical fare of the
day. In the two areas of taste to which critics traditionally have
objected--the revolting aspect of some scenes and all the extravagant
improbabilities—Reynolds docunents numerous large-selling
contenporaries who outshined Poe.

Poe himself pinpointed 1834 as the crucial shift in journalism,
with the establishnent of the New York sun, the first successful penny
newspaper, and in the process indicated an awareness of the profound
social impact of the sensational press. He wrote, "The consequences of
the schene [of tie E's founder, Moses Beach, and editor, Richard Adam
Locke] in their influence on the whole newspaper business of the
country, and through this business on the interests of the country at
large, are probably beyond all calculation" (Essays and Reviews 1214).
He was prefacing a discussion of one such effect, the series of
variously legitimate, sensational and outright fictitious journal
articles that prepared the way for Richard Adam Locke's extremely

successful 'moon hoax' article of 1835, including Poe's own fictitious

53

account of a balloon ascent to the moon, "The Unparalleled Adventure of
One Hans Pfaall" (1835). In Poe's story, which resenbles a hoax (though
it does not seen to have hoaxed its readerss), Poe satirizes both
sensational journalism, and his own contribution to it, in "Pfaall": in
an introductory renark, the narrator asks "Who, let me ask you, ever
heard of a balloon manufactured entirely of dirty newspapers?"6

The voyages of both Pfaall and Pym were taken as articles of
sensational appeal. But however singular Poe's intent for m seens on
its face, the issue becones complicated at the very monent of initial
reaction, by the variety of expectations, fulfilled or not, with which
the first readers read. Analysis of the critiques, sunnnaries and
announcenents yields a range of types which they implicitly assume Poe
to be striving for with m.

Though there is a good deal of ambivalence and uncertainty within
the reviews, reviewers generally understood 3m to be at least one of
three forms of adventure narrative: an authentic travel journal, such
as the then—prevalent collections of "neriner's chronicles": a fictional
but realistic travel journal, such as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe: or a
fantastic narrative without the constraints of verisimilitude, for
example Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Their estimates of M's value
varied in part according to varied criteria appropriate to the form by
which they chose to perceive it.

The three categories are tied to journalism itself in slightly
different ways. Readers who took it as a factual report, or a
purportedly factual one, perceived it as journalism itself, and neasured

it foreaost according to authenticity. Those who held it to this

S4

criterion and found it to be inauthentic--which were all but two
reviewers who took it at face value-—did not accept it then as fiction,
but dismissed it as a hoax, a "deception," or a "lie." The reviewer of
the Metromlitan Magazine, of London, is an example: "As a romance, some
portions of it are sufficiently amusing and exciting; but, when palmed
upon the public as a true thing, it cannot appear in any other light
than that of a bungling business--an impudent atteapt at imposing on the
credulity of the ignorant" ("Contennporary" 48).

The only entirely censorious American review is also in this
category; it is also the longest- and best-known, and undoubtedly
responsible for the false perception that _Py;n_ generally was received
poorly. The heat in William Burton's review in the September, 1838
issue of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine apparently does not come, as one
might suppose, frann personal animus; it would be almost two years before
Burton was to fire Poe, a year after hiring him as editor of
Gentlenan's. Rather, it stems from a sense of insult as a reader.
While M suffers from "discrepancies and other errors," "faulty
construction," and "poorness of style," it is because m is "a d-d
lie!" that "canpelled us to throw it away in contenpt." He implies he
might have accepted it as a fictional account, and cites Swift's
Gulliver's Travells (1726), More's m (1516), Robert Paltock's Life
and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751), Sinbad of The Arabian Nights,
and several other works that signal their own fictionality. Unlike
these, 2m lacks substance—the "political satire of Swift," for
instance-and is not "confessedly a work of the imagination"

("Oontenporary" 39).

5'3

A more imaginative group of reviewers accepted Em as fiction, and
judged it formst on the criterion of verisimilitude. The New York
_R_egi_e_w_ of October 1838 invokes by comparison two popular verisimilar
fictitious voyages. In PM there is a cannnendable attennpt "by
sinplicity of style, minuteness of nautical description, and
circnnnstantility of narration, to throw over it that air of reality
which constitutes the charm of Robinson Crusoe, and [Jane Porter's] Sir
Edward Seaward's Narrative [1831]" (Contemporary 44). Unlike these, m
is judged a failure in its departure from the standard invoked: the
conclusion "breaks off suddenly in a mysterious way, which is not only
destitute of vraisenblance, but is purely perplexing and vexatious. We
cannot therefore but consider the author unfortunate in his plan"
("Contemporary" 44)

If Burton advised the author to contain sensational materials by
adherence to factual truth, and the New York Rem writer thought they
should be contained by imaginative restraint, the largest share of
reviewers more or less welcomed with good humor M's most extravagant
elements. Whatever they were expecting, they register delight at the
surprises, the excitement, and, in words frequently used, the "wonders"
that "abound" in fig. Typically for this group, the review in Horace
Greeley's weekly New Yorker, of 1837, found it "a work of extraordinary,
freezing interest. ...Those who delight in the wonderful and horrible
have a feast before then" (43). The Family Maga_zine of 1839 proclainned
"Omnd us to Arthur Gordon Pym! He is a genius and his adventures rare
and wonderful," and the reader may find himelf "ready and willing to
admit" that they are "unre astonishing than any before recorded"

( "Oontenporary" 46) .

56

Pollin opines that no contemporary reviewer saw Poe's "playful
method" (Imaginagy 15). On the contrary, few critics in subsequent
decades responded to the playfulness and humor as appreciatively as this
group. Whatever their duties at their respective posts, they clearly
enjoyed the responsibility of reading and reviewingqum, Since then,
only W; H. Auden and Pollin himself have responded to this dimension.
Several 'banter' with Poe by affecting a tone of dismissal, outrage, or
astonisl'mnent at having been 'taken for a ride,' only to express delight
in the trip. In a review on August 22, 1838, the Alexander's Eggkgy
Messenger, of Philadelphia, reprints the title, and follows:
Think of that Master Brook! What say you, reader to
that for a title page? we assure you the bodk, if
possible, is:more marvellous still. Captain Riley's
narrative-I was a tame affair, canpared to it.
Incredible' forsooth! The author should have said
M13. What will our nautical friends say to the
feat of running a sloop with a jib...?8 What will
the government say to the discoveries near the south
pole? Will they not recall the southern exploring
expedition,9 whidh is rendered wholly unnecessary by
Pym's discoveries? Wnat will the Nantucket folks say to
the miracle of a vessel being fitted out Eran that
port, which.had never been heard of there...?10
(walker 94-95)

The diatribe continues, only to culmdnate in endorsement for a "very

clever extravaganza, after the manner of De Foe. It indicates great

'37

talent and vivacity, and will be perused with amusement by every class
of readers" (walker 94-5). Pollin identifies "Brook" as the name Ford
assumes in The MErry Wives of Windsor. Perhaps the buyer and reader of
m, the reviewer seats to suggest, will pay for his or her own
seduction, as FOrd pays Falstaff to seduce his own wife.

In a similar tone of banter, the Philadelphian Saturday Courieg, of
August 4, 1838, calls the book "as full of 'incredibles' as man can
desire....Jack the Giant Killer is a fool to 'Peters.'" This reviewer's
pranotion of m is implicit, and perhaps equivocal, as he tantalizes
the reader with sane of the "incredibles": unspecified discoveries "far
beyond the 84th parallel of southern latitude" and "all manner of
adventures," only to conclude with an apparently pretended air of
offense, which could itself have a promotional effect: "When we find a
respectable endorser for Pym's statenents, we will gig}: of believing
them" ("Contemporary" 42).

With a mischievously enbellished sunnnary, a reviewer for the Na
Monthly Maggzine, of london, associates m with the tall tale tradition
of the American frontier:

Arthur Pym is the American Robinson Crusoe, a nnnan all
over wonders, who sees nothing but wonders, vanquishes
nothing but wonders, would indeed, evidently, scorn to
have anything to do but with wonders, and who, after
having been buried in a whirlpool a hundred fathan
below the centre of the earth, comes home with a
considerable fragment of the magnetic meridian in one
pocket, and a frozen slice of the eighty-forth degree of

South latitude in the other, and sits down. . . to write

58
his Journal. ("Contenporary" 49)

Sketching a figure less like Robinson Crusoe than Davy Crockett and Paul
Bunyan, the reviewer takes his cue from Poe himself in giving his
readers quite a bit more than the truth.

While the foregoing has discriminated among basic responses to 2.2L“.
by focussing upon several more or less internally consistent reviews,
taken as a whole, what stands out among these reviews is the
ambivalence, hesitancy and equivocation that predominates some, and is
evident in most. Sane clearly take pleasure in the mixed
signals 3m and it infamus title (release; others, not knowing how to
take it, reflect confusion themselves, as they negotiate gm's
authenticity, literary qualities, and moral content.

A striking example of unstable expectations is the review in the
London A_tl._a_s_ of October 20, 1838. The reader is warned he will be
surprised at pranised discoveries south of the 84th parallel, "but when
he canes to read then his surprise will cease." 2m might have been
"entertaining, had the writer been a little more careful in subduing his
tendency for the marvellous. He has so ridiculously overdone the
recital, that the volume cannot impose [sic] on anybody." Sounding
nearly as cheated as Burton, and more uncertain about whether the work
claims to be the truth, aims at a realistic effect, or neither, he
complains that "there are many statements in the book that might be
true, and others that could not be true, and the result is that we doubt
the vraisenbable, because our faith is shaken by the impossible." He
recounts m' s preface as an apparently authentic history of the

narrative, but he refutes other events on a variety of grounds, such as

59

citing British explorer James Weddell's discoveries (he found the Ronne
Ice Shelf at 74' S) as proof that Pym could not have penetrated the
eighties.

By the fifth paragraph he acknowledges it might all be a work of
fiction "after the nnnanner of Robinson Crusoe," and in the last paragraph
he sees finally to regard it as a fantastic story, citing Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein (1817) , and offering an incongruous suggestion
for getting Pym hane, which the otherwise "fertile imagination" of the
author is unable to do: "Could not [Pym] get on the back of an albatross
and canpel the bird to carry him back to Nantucket? Daniel Rourke, Esq.
thus visited the noon on the back of an eagle" (Walker 101-03) .

Several reviewers select words which avoid counitting the writer as
to the kind of work 13m is, or as to its value. In as close to a
substantive statenent as it gets, the New York Gazette review of July
30, 1838, called m "a very extraordinary volune" (Pollin, "American
Newspapers" 9). an August 10, 1838 the New York newspaper Lax;
sunnmarized 3m, and cryptically cemented "What are we to think of it?
There is a deal of ingenius mystification about the author's trip, which
everyone must unravel according to his own fancy. For our part we say
nothing: but we think we can see as far into a millstone as any
body....He tells sane wonderful things, that's certain (Pollin,
"American Newspapers" 10)

Unfavorable reviewers were quick to condemn m for moral
irresponsibility. The Monthly Review of October, 1838 canplains that
sane of the "most elaborate scenes. . .are disgustingly horrible. . .[and]

we do not see any good end in such descriptions" ("Contemporary" 50).

60
In its mannered prose, the Snowdens Ladies' Companion of September,
1838, expresses, if not outright condemnation of an immoral subject,
then unease at a dubious one. Of the unclear authorship of gym: "It
Should be a matter of perfect indifference to the public, who the author
is; the book has been written and i§_published, and that, certainly, is
knowledge enough." In fact, as the summary that makes up the bulk of the
review largely repeats the title, one wonders how much of the book had
been read. Explicit judgment--of reservation-is rendered only in the
ambivalent last sentence: "From the above synopsis it will be perceived
that the work has somewhat of a questionable character, but
notwithstanding is most interesting" (Pollin, "Snowden" 33-34).
Finally, the negative estimate of the New York Review: m "is not
destitute of interest for the imagination, but the interest is painful:
there are too many atrocities, too many strange horrors..."
("Contemporary" 44).

What becomes apparent in the tangled, miscued, and ambivalent
responses is that gym was subverting its readers' interpretive
strategies. The adventure story in the early nineteenth century, like
other forms of sensational fiction, had its roots in nonfictional,
didactic, and often religiously-charged forms of discourse: narratives
of Indian warfare, captivity, wilderness or sea adventure, crime, etc.
Yet while it played up the bizarre, the grotesque, and the perverse, it
often subtlyy dropped moralization. This trend, documented by Reynolds,
reveals the cultural determination of‘g g and others, for these elements
represent just those irrational forces that sealed threatening morally

and ideologically to a social order increasingly unstable in these

61
areas. Without moral reassurance or closure, M presents topics such
as Egyptology, spiritualism, cryptography, and many others which while
popular, were also disturbing and ideologically threatening in a variety
of ways that have yet to be analyzed in any existing study of m. In
the Tsalal episodes, for instance, he stimulates the pervasive fear of
slave revolt across the American South, heightened in the aftermath of
Nat Turner's insurrection in 1831. In the cannibal scenes and others of
violence and butchery, he suggests the bestial behavior of which
numerous reports from the frontier were denonstrating humans--even white
Qnristiansuwere capable .
‘ Even the unusual discoveries "South of the 84's" are neither
comforting nor clear at the narrative's conclusion. Today we can only
speculate about the anxiety felt by earlier generations, whose sense of
the world and the cosnnns was vulnerable to discoveries in vast "blank
spaces" on the world map. Indeed, however ridiculous they seem. to us,
the widely popular stories of sea-monsters, bizarre cultures and
fantastic polar phenannena must be understood in the context of the
limitations of definitive knowledge about such matters. Among the
reviews of m, the ambivalence on one hand , and the heavy-handed tones
of indignation on the other betray anxieties that confirm Harry levin's
choice of Poe, a century later, as one of the "triumvirate of
disquietude," along with Melville and Hawthorne (34).: he might well have
included a good nany of his now rarely-read contenporaries , such as
William Gilmore Sims, Robert Montgomery Bird, Alice Cary, and George

Lippard .

3

The Genteel Censure of Poe

Poe ' s Nineteenth-Centugy Reputation
Following the contenporary notices of Pym, there is little

discussion of the work over the next one hundred years in any of the
fields of discourse in which that might occur—studies of Poe's work,
biographical scholarship, statenents of literary criticism or history.
Though m has frun the first been available in standard collected works
of Poe, there to have been little awareness of the work in the
literary cannunity apart frann Poe specialists. Biographers and scholars
dealt with it, but in most cases only as a small cluster of biographical
or historical facts. Until W. H. Auden's enthusiastic revelation of flu
in his introduction to his own selection of Poe's writing, in 1950,
there appears hardly a single statement about the work that contains
mre than a few sentences of criticism. men the appearance of m as
the najor part of the first Collected Works (in 1856, five years after
the first three volumes) went all but unnoticed, despite the fact that
debate in the press among Poe's friends and enemies was still hot and
heavy.11
Perhaps the most curious fact about M's history is that Auden
'discovered' 2y! only for the critics, for the work itself, if not

ubiquitous, has been, consistently printed and sold in steadily

increasing volume, from the date of its second edition, 1856, onward.

62

63

No less than sixty-seven American editions of 3m appeared between that
date and 1950, with many reprintings. While inclusion in complete—works
editions is not evidence of Em's popularity, there were numerous
exclusive editions of m, and of incomplete collections that included
it. In fact, it has generally been available in multiple forms, to
every class of reader. In his 1978 bibliography of 33, Burton Pollin
reports his conclusion upon examining copies of numerous editions:
"Adaptations and cheap two-column newsprint magazines or book copies
were available to the youthful and the impecunious, while the affluent
could always procure nmnltivolume sets, sane handsomely printed and
bound" (93).

Available bibliographical infornnnation shows not only that Poe was
along the most inportant and popular American authors internationally,
but that gym was amng the most popular of his writings. Pollin fonmd
three hundred twenty editiens, translations and adaptations.

In France it has received critical acclaim, though not universally,
frann the beginning on par with the rest of Poe's prose. Baudelaire does
not say much about 3! in his three influential essays (1852, 1856,
1857) or his prefaces: but then he acknowledges his own inadequacies as
a critic, and in fact says little about any of the works in these
highly-charged appreciations of his tribulations and his genius. that
he does say indicates that in no sense did he regard it as inferior to
the short prose, or relegate it to the margins of the Poe canon as
unsuccessful or trivial, as American critics and scholars would for over
a century. He brought it out as the third of his five-volune

translation, and attempted to interest the critic Sainte—Beuve in what

64

he called "a purely human book" and "an admirable novel": "You, who so
love profundities, why not investigate the profundities of Edgar Poe?"
(qtd. in P. Quinn French Face 171). Since Baudelaire, it has undergone
four translations, has been introduced in editions by such distinguished
figures as Jules Verne, Jules Romaine, and Gaston Bachelard (P. Quinn
French Face 170).

We must look beyond the statements about gm itself in order to
understand the scant danestic literary response. Two contextual frames
deserve sane scrutiny for the light they can shed on this: innediately,
the problematic prevailing attitudes toward Poe during this period: and
more broadly, the relationship of the work to the aesthetic values .
prenulgated in the literary establishment of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.

Poe's early reputation has been a subject of considerable
study.12 A number of Poe scholars have noted that early criticism as
well as nmnch late criticism has been affected by a failure to
discriminate between the man and his work: what were perceived to be
inmoral stories and guilty or nnentally unsound narrators were considered
to be a direct extension of an authorial mind of the same qualities.
This perception was reinforced by the persistent legend of Poe's
personality and behavior. A French critic succinctly said in 1865 what
most Allerican commentators more or less held to be true: "Every study of
the work of Edgar Poe should be preceded by a biographical note--a very
short one-because it is indispensible to the understanding of. this
peculiar talent which is daninated and inundated by strangeness. " His

conclusion too, founded upon supposed biographical factors, distills a

65

type of American response that obtained more or less unchanged for a
century: "[This analysis] can be summarized by saying. ..that Edgar Poe,
as writer, is the product of alcohol and the mathenatical spirit in a
man of imgination of the Anglo-Saxon race" (Alexander 1.95).

From his death to mid-twentieth century, precious little was said
about Poe's writing that was not charged in some way with moral
assessnent of Poe's behavior, personality, and circumstances. As we
will see, this is not unique: nnnorality in author and work alike were
touchstones of nineteenth-century criticism. What is unique with Poe's
case is the pitch, the degree of polarization, and the longevity of
debate about Poe's place in literature. A number of causes for this
have been adduced, nest involving Poe himself and his social relations:
his ignoble personal and professional reputatiens: the calunnious
publication of his literary executor, Rufus Griswold: enmity built up
between Poe and many other influential persons in the
literary-publishing circles: and sectional prejudice in the heated
decades preceding the Civil War. All of these were exacerbated by Poe's
unsparing literary criticism of his contemporaries, and by the running,
career-ending journalistic warfare which this often generated, and which
ruined Poe himself professionally in 1846.13

While the 'Griswold factor' has tended to obscure the other
factors, it would be difficult to overstate the effect a single nan had
upon the posthunneus opinion of Poe, almost from the day he died. Of Poe
obituaries, it was his, solicited by the New York Daily Tribune (October
9, 1849), that became the nest widely known and taken as the most

authoritative:14 and it was his forty-page "Memoir of the Author"

66

(1850) that becanne the official and sole biographal account for the next
three decades, and primary source of the world's knowledge of Poe even
beyond. Poe biography relied largely on Griswold, even after John H.
Ingram revealed that Griswold had forged correspondence and fabricated
"facts" in the 'nanoir' in order to place Poe in the worst possible
light (Miller 4).15

To command such authority, Griswold enjoyed a position no other
individual had: he had known Poe personally: he was named, apparently by
Poe himself, to be literary executor (A. Quinn 662-63), editing the
standard collection of Poe's work (the vehicle for the "Memoir"): and he
enjoyed a national reputation as one of the preeminent authorities in
the literary world, on the strength of his numerous anthologies and
biographies of American authors. One editor called him "the great
Apollo of our literary heavens" (Daniel 358). What he did with this
power is authorize sane of the worst rumors and attitudes extant during
Poe's life, and with his own slighting criticism, significantly shape
the way others would read Poe for decades to come.

While Griswold offers many laudatory and discerning insights about
Poe's style and originality in the "Memoir," it is daninated by the
rich, vivid, villainous portrait of Poe, and the ways in which his
character flaws are projected into his art. As Griswold put it, "Every
genuine author. . .leaves in his works. . .traces of his personal
character," and with Poe there was "a singular harmony."16 Three
negative aspects of Poe reenerge time and again. First, Poe was annan
with "no moral susceptibility": unreliable, "vicious" in his treatnent

of others, full of "self—conceit," and so pitifully "ambitious" that

67
"you could not speak of wealth, but his cheek paled with gnawing envy":
he was also a drunkard, an expellee from the University of Virginia,
where he had "led a very dissipated life," an army deserter, and a
habitual plagiarist "scarcely paralleled. . .in all literary history." His
art follows: it is "without a recognition or a manifestation of
conscience."

Secondly, Griswold imputes a sense of superficiality to Poe's mind,
resulting in work that is imbued with qualities of sensationalism,
shallowness and cheapness. largely this is done by 'faint praise' for
Poe as a facile master of effect, able to "drug the mind," rather than
as a genuine or profound artist. Thus he praises the "analytical
subtlety" in his "strange and spectral and revolting creations," and his
"almost faultless" taste, which nonetheless "evinces little of the
genuine feeling" that is necessary to "immortal verse."

Finally, what has had perhaps the most pernicious effect is the
subtle suggestion throughout the 'memoir' that Poe is not only estranged
frcmn society by "harsh circumstances," but that he is sanehow innately
alien to humanity, a denizen of one of his own "weird" landscapes. It
is worth quoting one paragraph at length:

He was at all times a dreamer—dwelling in ideal realms-in
heaven or hell-peopled with the creatures and the accidents
of his brain. He walked the streets, in madness or melancholy,
with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes upturned
in passionate prayer, (never for himself, for he felt, or
professed to feel, that he was already damned, but) for their

happiness who at the moment were objects of his idolatry:--or,

68

with his glances introverted to a heart gnawed with anguish. . .
he would speak as if to spirits that at such times only could
be evoked by him from Aidenn, close by whose portals his
disturbed soul sought [forgetfulness]... . (56)
This passage contains elenents of what would later crystallize into two
variants of Poe: on one hand the insane genius (or pretender); and on
the other, Poe as an alien in his own land, with a sensibility perhaps
European, but certainly unannerican, as Van Wyck Brooks would say in
1915, "having nothing in cannon with the world that produced him" (34).
Taken together or separately, these three aspects were a kind of
template from which an overwhelming number of portraits of Poe were
drawn for the next century.

Griswold's attitude toward Poe and his work was echoed by other
prminent voices in the years immediately following Poe's death, neny of
whan also had persanal animus toward Poe.17 A nnmnber of the defenders
of Poe who saw power, originality and genius in Poe's work qualified
their praise with moral condemnation of Poe himself and his work, and
therefore his literary rank.18 A considerable number of defenses of
Poe and his work have been documented. It is important to note that
those written by individuals who knew Poe—most notably Philadelphia
editor George Graham, New York novelists Nathaniel Parker Willis and
John Neal, and Boston's James Russell Lowell—vigorously defended Poe's
mral integrity. 19 Sane defenders of Poe who experienced, or accepted
others' testimony, of his unpredictability developed a kind of
Jekyll-and-Hyde theory.20 For instance, Willis, one of Poe's closest

friends, knew him as "quiet, patient, industrious, and most

69

gentlenanly." Yet he accepted Griswold's disparaging characterization to
the point of quotirg six paragraphs fran Griswold's obituary in his own
1850 essay, attributing these traits to a 'side' of Poe Willis claimns
not to have seen, a "reverse phase" brought about by liquor (Carlson
Mition 37). Of Poe's work, Willis said in an earlier review that
he was sure it "will long survive, as among the ablest and most
remarkable of American productions" (Walker 263).

Of course not every early critic had known Poe, and not every
critic who knew him injected personal or political interest. In a
preview of the Prose Ranances (1843), critic Park Benjamin proclaimed
"this gentleman as one of the best writers of the English language now
living" (Walker 29). Longfellow, who could have hurt Poe badly for
Poe's groundless accusations against him of plagiarism, spoke only in
the highest terms of Poe's work and potential, if largely in
private.21 (Poe's abuse of him may well have silenced public praise
frann that source.) He once wrote to Poe "I think you are destined to
stand among the first ranance-writers of the country, if such be your
aim" (qtd. in A. Quinn 317). Similarly, Lowell's early enthusiasm for
Poe was dampened by late accusations of plagiarism and harsh critici-
of his own work. But his widely-read 1845 essay22 stands out for its
detacment and manents of insightful analysis. It is diffuse and

23 and therefore did not form a solid

occasionally contradictory,
counterbalance to Griswold's essay. However the overall sense conveyed
is'that Poe possessed "the prime qualities of genius, a faculty of

vigorous yet minute analysis, and a wonderful fecundity of imagination. "

He contradicts Griswold in crediting Poe's art with power and depth

In,“
bow

70

beyond "mere artifice," and suggests he will always hold "an individual
eninence in our literature" (167) . Interestingly, it was New England
Uhiversalist minister C. Chauncey Burr that reflected Poe's own
critical principles in his 1852 estimate of Poe, precisely contradicting
the one thing almost everyone else agreed on, that Poe was writing
himself into his work:
That perfection of horror that abounds in his writings, has
been unjustly attributed to sane moral defect in the man. But
I perceive not why the competent critic should fall into this
error. Of all authors, ancient or modern, Poe has given us the
least of himself in his works.‘He wrote as an artist [original
enphasis]. (qtd. in A. Quinn 678)
Burr's critical acumen permitted seemingly twentieth-century insight in
explaining why Poe was "the greatest artist among modern authors": "He
prdbed the general psychological law, in its subtle windings through the
mystic Chambers of our being, as it was never prdbed before, until he
stood in the very abyss of its centre, the sole master of its effect"
Other factors besides interpersonal experience shaped the
nineteenth-century attitude toward Poe. Over the century as a whole,
sectional conflict figures as a central element. Against the
culturally-unifying tendency of the commercial and transportation
transformation of the 1830's and 1840's, polarization over the slavery
question produced North-South tensions that went frann bad to inflamed
over the course of Poe's professional life. Two key components of this
equation were the long-lived daninance exerted by New angland in the

arts and cultural discourse: and, what particularly rankled southern

71

literary people (and none more than Poe), the moralistic and idealistic
strains that characterized much of that discourse. Of course, these
strains were then being revitalized by such forces of reform as the
evangelical Great Revival, transcendentalism, the abolition cause. The
results were often dogmatic, prejudicial attitudes.24

While his southern roots did not help him win influence in Boston
and other northern cities, the South did~not provide him much
campensatory support . Certainly he had ardent supporters among southern
writers, such as Virginia novelist John Pendleton Kennedy, Baltimore
novelist Philip Pendleton Cooke, Georgia poet Thanas Holley Chivers and
South Carolina novelist William Gilmore Simnns. And though each of these
showed themselves willing to assist a friend and fellow Southerner, as
he progressively became more embroiled in legal and financial difficulty
in northern cities, their support was limited by several factors, both
before and after his death. In several cases, their correspondence
indicates dwindling enthusiasm, as they had no reason to disbelieve

every disreputable account circulated by Poe's enemies}5

Moreover, as
Hubbell indicates, Poe was not vigorously defended for southern
literature by the South as others were because, in a period of polemical
rhetoric, Poe rarely wrote about the South or issues of concern to
Southerners (American Writers 108) .

But those that did seek to help him were also limited by
circumstances. There was no powerful southern literary clique or
coterie, like that of Boston or that emerging in New York around Clark
and Ouyckinck and the large, capital-rich publishing firms. Except for

Richmond's Southern Litemy Messenger, (and that only because of Poe's

72

work as assistant editor in the mid-thirties), Richmond and Baltimore
lacked publishing, cannercial, and educational institutions with the
national prestige and reach enjoyed by those of the big northern cities.
New England daminance was neither partial or ephemeral. When Poe
was writing, almost all the writers with anything like a national
reputation were of New England, except Irving and Cooper, while none
were of the South, a pattern that would continue until well after the
Civil War.26 When Howells said in 1902 that "The great New Englanders
would none of him [Poe]," he was speaking of lowell, Iongfellow,
Enerson, James, etc., but he could have said the same of lesser names
who, in the aggregate, wield their own kind of power. The New England
literary historians, critics, editors, and anthologists were more widely
read than those of any other region, and ruined highly respected long
after New York achieved a more daminant role in the national literary
market. They had little room in their publications for southern
writers, and even less for a hostile southerner whose art and critical
theory was alien in many respects to their own.”
Winters complained in 1937 that Poe "has been pretty effectually
established as a great writer while we have been sleeping." Whether the
major critical figures to that time were, with Winters, sleeping, Poe
was indeed established, by the efforts of a number of marginal voices.
In 1902 Eugene Didier seems to be the first to mention a 'Poe cult,' and
suggests that it had its origins in the unveiling of the monument to Poe
in Baltimore in 1875. In 1885 Edmund Clarence Stedman referred to this
as well, a counterforce to those who saw in Poe's writings nothing but

"the false and insincere." He describes this "sentimental" criticism as

73

a "chorus of indiscriminate praise [that] has grown so loud as to really
to be an ill amen for his fame" (226). More useful for that fame were
items such as the Englishman John H. Ingram's biography, the first that
can be called scholarly (though it idealizes Poe as almost a saint and
martyr), Woodberry's biographical work (Eggar Allan Poe [1885], expanded
into the two-volume £113 in 1909 [rpt. 1965], the standard until Arthur
H. Quinn's), and Woodberry and Stedman's own textual scholarship in
co-editing their Collected Works (1894-95), and Stedman's critical
statenents, most notably the influential essay on Poe in Poets of
America of 1885 (226). In 1907 two Ian 1: literary histories
(appeared, one of America and the other a history and collection of
Southern literature . Though neither mentions gm, both provide
extensive, thoughtful recognition of Poe's contribution, Charles Kent's
essay in the latter including a "plea for ungrudging recognition" of
"one of the chief glories of the literature of our nation." One of the
most widely-used anthologies of the *turn-of-the-century holds Poe, along
with Whitman/above all other poets."28

Poe was not adnmitted into the Hall of Fame of Great Americans in
its first two elections at New York University in 1900 and 1905. Ext he
was in 1910, the year after his centenary (Hubbell, American Writers
94-95). Bibliographies reveal a surge of interest and materials an Poe
in the centenary, while the treatments of Poe in most works about
American literature by even those unsympathetic to Poe's writing reveal
that he was becaming indisputably a major American writer, whatever his
merits or demerits. Major spokesmen, such as Brownell, Vernon L.

Parrington, and Norman Foerster, and major writers, such as James and

74
Eliot, continued to speak rarely and largely disparagingly, but with a
growing sense of respect for status conferred by voices around the
margins of American 'belles lettres' that could not forever be ignored:
Poe's ever-expanding damestic readership: writers and critics fran
overseas, who testified, especially fram France, to his influence and
regard there: 29 biographers and textual scholars of Poe, such as James
Harrison, Killis Campbell, Margaret Alterton, and Olive T'. Mabbott (in
addition to the earlier contributions of Ingram, Stednman, and
Woodberry.) Younger American critics pranoting a more open and diverse
canon were also more receptive. Finally, and perhaps most significantly
for Poe studies, a many domestic poets have been particularly drawn to
Poe, fram Vachel Lindsay, Hart Crane, Robinson, and William C. Williams,
to Tate, Wilbur, and Auden. Until mid-century, perhaps only D. H.
Lawrence, in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), and critic
Edmund Wilson ("Poe at Home and Abroad," 1926) spoke with a resonance to
rival the largely detractive voices of James and Eliot.

Many of the principal early architects of an American literary and
cultural history were working to a large extent within the New Egland
canon, and the assumption that American culture was an outgrowth of New
England. Frequently they reiterated, ecl'oed and developed in nmore
sophisticated dress Griswold's characterization of Poe, and the
biographically-oriented method of Poe criticism that be instituted.
Norman Foerster, in his landmark American Criticism (1928), considered
Poe's problem to be morality: he "lacked interest in hnmanity," and the
result is deficient art: he was "unnmoral and unphilosophical in his

poems and tales because he was himself unmoral and unphilosophical. "

75
In America Coming of Age (1915), Van wycb Brooks describes Poe's work as
"sinister" and "hysterical" (32-33).

In.Main Currents of American Thought Vernon Parrington reiterates
the idea that Poe was a sort of intellectual alien, and a bizarre
genius. ‘He was at odds with "every major interest of the New England
renaissance," and with "Jacksonian America" as a whole. As a man who
"aside fram his art. ..had no philosophy and no programs and no causes,"
he was "outside the mainstream. " Citing the old list of behavioral '
irregularities, he delegates "the prdblem of Poe" to "abnormal
psychology" and the study of his work to "the helletrist" (55-6).

3 A principle charge in the early twentieth century was that Poe's
work was vulgar, sensational, and shallow; that, as James put it, "to
take [Poe] with more than a certain degree of seriousness is to lack
seriousness one's self.” He remarked, in 1887, that "an enthusiasm for
Poe is the mark of a decidedly primdtive stage of reflection.... [but
he was] a charlatan" (Carlson Essays 82). Winters attempts to show that
both Poe's practice and theory of art will preclude it fram art's
richest function. As.Wflnters understands Poe's "The Poetic Principle,"
beauty, the proper subject of art, exists not in this world, but in
eternity, where the artist seems to transport us by manipulation and "a
kind of emotional delusion." However, says Winters, this is confusing
"the subject and the style of poetry." To treat beauty as the subject of
poetry gives "an air of mystery, of strangeness," but is ultimately
trivial, and "can be of no aid to us in understanding ourselves or in
ordering our lives, for most of our experience is irrelevant to it"

(Carlson R_e_cgg§ition 185) .

76

T. S. Eliot's most extensive public statement about Doe was his
1949 centenary address at the Library of Congress. Here he offered a
qualified appreciation of Poe's rich influence on French poetry. If he
earlier regarded Poe's writing as "slipshod," "Peurile," and
"unscrupulous," as he suggests, now he cautiously elaborates what he
thought these poets "saw" in Poe: he indicates the "incantatory element"
in the poetry; and he notes "the variety of form of expression," in a
body of work in which they nevertheless found an "essential unity,"
where Anglo critics perceived dabbling and fragmentation. He credits
Baudelaire with appreciating a formalist critical principle the English
world had only receitly recognized, that "the goal of poetry is of the
same nature as its principle, and that it should have nothing in view

but itself" (205, 209, 215).

Pym and Early Poe Scholarship
Few of the attitudes about Poe's writing and Poe's place in our

literature up until mid-century explicitly involved M- The few
discussions are almost entirely from those projects in which the speaker
was necessarily offering a chprehensive treatment of Poe's writing:
oammentary acccmpanying collected works editims, biographies, and,
rarely, American literary histories. Griswold devotes one paragraph to
E!!! in his "humoir," damning it with the faint praise that it is "not
without some sort of merit," though he is not specific. As an imitation
of well-known realistic narratives such as Robinson Crusoe, it lacks the
"pleasing interests" of these, and its failure is a result of Poe's

"tendency to extravagance. . .the most striking infirmity of his genius"

77

(52). John M. Daniel, of the Richmondjaminer, wrote an emotional,
almost hysterical essay in 1850, assailing Poe for wasting "creative
faculties" that, but for a profligate life, might have given him a
stature comparable to "the Miltons, the Shakespeares." Instead, his
poetry is "execrably had," his prose generally the product of "want and
dyspepsia. . . and blue devils." Nonetheless, on the strength of a few
"gems" he did produce, one of which is 13m, "no other American has half
the chance of rubrance in the history of literature." He suggests
that "Among those terrible scenes, and in strange descriptions of
undiscovered islands and unknown savages, the temper and genius of this
author revel undisturbed." He judges the final pages to be among the
most "remarkable ...passages in all of Poe's writings," and calls the
work "unjustly disparaged and neglected" (Walker 374).

Key literary histories that treat Poe either ignore Em, most
praminently Barrett's and Brownell's, or treat it in passing. Leon
Vincent in American Literary busters (1906) describes it in a paragraph,
noting that "only at rare intervals does Poe's peculiar genius flash
out." William Simonds' A Student's History of American Literature (1909)
praises Poe's work as "characterized by an exquisite alliance of poetry
and music," resulting in a "perfection of form," and has a higher view
of gm. If parts are "morbid" and "offensive," nonetheless "his poetic
imagination asserts itself in wonderful dwcriptions of unknown lands
and the mysterious white sea" (211). airprisingly, histories of the
Nmerican novel largely ignored PM until about the nineteen-eighties.
An earlier exception is Alexander Cowie's Rise of the American 3%

(1948). In a four page analysis, including a summary, suggestions for

78

several sources, and critical remarks, he argues that, taken on its own
terms, "one may allow [m] a great deal of merit." Its unique, "loose"
structure properly understood, M can be taken as a series of episodes
much as Poe suggests that Paradise Lost is properly read as "a series of
minor poems," as Poe says in "The Poetic Principle" (Poe E_ss_a_}§ 71)-
Thus 3!; does not necessarily violate his own stated principles of unity
of effect and brevity in an artistic work. Cowie goes on to compare the
work favorably to the rest of his work: "It contains passages as
gripping as Poe ever wrote, details as carefully capitalized as any in
his best short stories, imaginative effects seldam equalled by Poe
elsewhere in prose or verse" (302)

Prior to Cmde's analysis, there is little besides the brief,
factual accounts of biographers. Even respected Poe scholar Killis
Campbell had no interpretive statements to male about 13m in his lengthy
essay in the Cambridge History of American Literature (1917), or in any
of his studies capiled in The Mind of Poe (1933). As Cowie suggested,
gm seeled an "embarrassment" to Poe critics. But perhaps also because
this period of Poe's life is the least doctmented, and has always been
the least known. During that year in New York, from February, 1837 to
saletime in the summer of 1838, he seems to have written very little
besides the latter portion of 2m. Unable to make a living there, in a
year of econanic depression, he departed with his family to
Philadelphia . Quinn' 5 750—page biography devotes only two pages to that
period, in addition to two pages of factual description and excerpts of
13m.

‘Ihe meager facts now accepted about the exposition and publication

79

of m are basically the same as those pieced together by John H.
Ingram in 1880, and the same that appear in the principal biographies
since: George Woodberry's Edgar Allan Poe (1885) and Life (1909), James
A. Harrison's Life and letters (1903), Hervey Allen's Israfel (1926),
Mary E. Phillips' Edgar Allan Poe, the @ (1.926), and Arthur H.
Quinn's. Those facts are as follows: that Poe began gym in Baltimore in
late 1836 or early 1837 as a serial for the Messenger, which published
two installments in January and February numbers. Fired by editor
Thalas mate in January, he completed it in New York over the next
several months. Harper 8. Brothers accepted it, with the recommendation
of James Kirk Paulding, announced it in May, copyrighted the title on
June 10. 1337, and published 1:. late July, 183830.

The few documeits that shed light on Poe's intentions and opinion
regarding the work have not grown from the several relevant letters
first printed in Harrison's and Woodberry's biographies: first, Harper 8.
Brothers' June, 1836 letter to Poe explaining tl'eir rejection of his
manuscript M of the Folio Club. In it Poe was advised that "Readers
in this country have a decided and strong preference for works
(especially fiction) in which a single and connected story occupies the
whole volume" (Harrison 17:35-36): and secondly, an 1840 letter from Poe
to William Burton, in which he called Burton's vitriolic
review—virtually a tirade—of 13m "essentially correct," and m itself
"a very silly book." But there may well be an element of face-saving
here, as the lengthy letter is a defensive respome to what Poe called
an "insulting" letter fram Burton (which we do not have.) He may have

wished to trivialize his personal investment in a book regarded as a

80
critical and camercial failure. Moreover, he also said in that context
"you will find yourself puzzled in judging me by ordinary motives"
(Woodberry 242-247). The nature of Poe's composition of and intention
for m has largely been a matter of inference and speculation, and will
be dealt with in chapter four in the context of studies that devote
attention to this. None of the biographies mentioned, and in fact no
biography I have examined prior to Julian Symond's The Tell-Tale Heart
(1978), offers substantive criticism. The otherwise highly-laudatory
Ingram had no praise for m, and considered it "unfinished" work.
Harrison emphasized Poe's dependence upon other sources, and dismissed
it as hardly original work, "equal parts Poe, "Ihe Ancient Mariner, ' and
Morell" (133); Woodberry regarded it as a "journalistic enterprise"
designed to capitalize upon the current popularity of sea tales and
interest in the south seas (190): and even Quinn, one of the most
sympathetic of the biographers, implicitly dismisses it as a significant
work by saying only that the final image of the mysterious white figure
will stay with the reader, "stimulating the imagination" (266).

Pym's get on James and Eliot

Yet if the major spokesmen had little to say about gm, still, as a
piece of the literary heritage that concerned then, it asserted a
peculiar presence. It made a lasting impression on James' imagination,
as evidenced in its recurrence in two prefaces and a novel. Early in
The Golden Bowl, Prince Amerigo recalls a "wonderful tale. . .of the
shipwrecked Gordon Pym" he had read as a child. He has been pondering
the "element of the impenetrable" in people's motives, specifically Mrs.

"C,

u; I

‘1

I.’ a"

r?

81

Assingham's in arranging his marriage, and he seizes upon a moment in
m as a kind of metaphor: drifting toward the pole, Pym "found at a
given moment before him a thickness of white air that was like a
dazzling curtain of light, concealing as darkness conceals, yet of the
colour of milk or snow. There were moments when he felt his own boat
move upon same such mystery" (James, 99—19%. 256-257). In his preface to
his collection of ghost stories, he refers to a failing in m in order
to make a related point about the the presentation of "prodigies,"
"strange encounters," or "phenomena," in fiction. They must be filtered
through a consciousness, a character's "history" in order to interest
us.
Intrinsic values they have none—as we feel for instance in
such a matter as the would-be portentuous climax of Edgar
Poe's 'Arthur Gordon Pym' where the indispensable history is
absent, where the phenomena evohed , the moving accidents,
caning straight, as I say, are immediate and flat, and the
attempt is all at the horrific in itself. 'I'ne result is that,
to my sense, the climax fails...for want of connedons....our
own further relation to the elelents.. .hang in the void."
(A_t; 256)
In her 1978 essay "James Corrects Poe: The Appropriation of m in
The Golden Bowl, " Adeline Tintner suggests that these interrelated
references go to the thematic heart of James' novel, noting that his
original title for the novel had been wification, the title of a Poe
tale. Introducing the 'moment' in M's climax in the opening of the

novel, James both "corrects" it, passing it through the consciousness of

82

Amerigo, and uses it as a template that has recurring relevance in human
relationships throughout the novel .

Poe remained as much an enigma for Eliot as he did for James-—as he
would say in a lecture toward the end of his life, "an enigma, a
stumbling block." For all his European influence, he could think of no
English-speaking poet who has been sensibly influenced by Poe; his work
suggests "the intellect of a gifted young person before puberty." At '
the same time he noted "one cannot be sure that one's own writing has
no; been influenced by Poe" (Carlson Rm. ition 206). Eliot evokes 3m
when he describes Poe's "pre-adolescent delights": "wonders of nature
(and of mechanics and of the supernatural, cryptograms and cyphers,
puzzles and labyrinths, and wild flights of speculation." Yet he credits
m as a foundation-stone in a rich Anglo—American genealogy, the
adventure ramance in the line of Rider Haggard and H. G. Wells, all of
which "too few" read today. For all its childishness, H! seem to have
had an effect on Eliot similar to that which he credits the poetry as
having on the French: "because of its very crudity, [it] stirs the
feelings at a deep and almost primitive level." This is evident, not in
any lengthy comment on the book, but in the fact that images of Pym's
voyage are evoked in a lengthy, nautical narrative in the ur-text of {tie
Waste Land, prior to the collaborative revision of Eliot and Pound.”
Eccised only at Pound's insisteice, the seventy-two line narrative
recounts a shipwreck at the foot of Mount Purgatory, at the South Pole,
and a voyage towards it which is as haunting, domed, and relentless as
Pym's: As they approach the pole, the aminms, white sea-scape resembles
that of m:

Samething which we knew must be a dawn-

83

A differentidarkness flowed above the clouds,
And dead ahead we saw, where sky and sea should meet ,
A line, a white line, a long white line,
A wall, a barrier, toward which we drove.32
It is possible to understand this image as suggesting a vast
mountain at Poe's pole, as well as Dante's and Eliot's: "The summit of

the cataract was utterly lost in the dimess and the distance. "

4

Morality and Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics

We have sought to understand the silence on m between the time of
its reviews and the mid-twentieth century by situating the book in the
context of disapprobation of Poe. To cmplete this etiology, we need to
step back further and analyze the aesthetic values which shaped the
culture. The notion that writing is an extension of the writer was,
througlout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries , a fmndamental
assumption of criticism, a heritage of Bgnantic poetics. For the
Romantics, as M. H. Abrams formulated it, "a work of art is essentially
the internal made external, resulting from a creative process operating
under the impulse of feeling, and embodying the combined product of the
poet's perceptions, thoughts, and feelings." The authorial subject
becanes not just the impetus of the process, but the implicit center of
the product itself. "The primary source and subject matter of a poem,

84
therefore, are the attributes and actions of the poet's own mind, " which
form "both the artistic product and the criteria by which it is to be
judged" (21-22).

Catherine Belsey's term "expressive realism" for the predominant
mode of literary discourse in the nineteenth century is a useful one,
combining the expressive theory articulated by Abrams and the
Aristotelian function of mimesis, dominating the neoclassical period and
continuing as a basic aesthetic value. Both authetic expression of the
author and representation of the world were taken for granted as
possible as well as desireable. "To understand the text [in the
expressive realist attitude] is to explain it in terms of the author's
ideas, psychological state or social background. " Consequently during
this period, and as Eelsey observes, continuing to the present, "the
commonest way to write about literature is to write a book about an
author, analysing his or her works chronologically to show the
developing skill with which the author's developing insights are
expressed" (13) .

The coherence of author and character into a single, stable subject
in turn has ideological significance. As Eelsey argues, "The work of
ideology is to present the position of the subject as fined and
unchangeable, an element in a given system of differences which is hnmn
nature and the world of human experience" (90). In each act of reading,
the reader does the conflating, constituting the subject into a coherent
consciousness. In the process, the reader beccmes implicated not just
in the text, but in the subject, constructed through his or her

consciousness .

85

In the American Renaissance, few cultural facts can be said to have
exerted greater pressure on literary discourse than the moral
imperative. Though certainly tied closely with English Romanticism,
imaginative and critical writing in the Renaissance had deep roots in
colonial America, including and especially the Puritan culture of New
England. But in all sections, Protestantism was among the preeminent
defining cultural forces, shaping discourse in form and aim long after
its power had begun to wane. Paramount among these aims was the
obligation of moral edification. Poe stated clearly this assumption in
"The Poetic Principle," and then pledged his career to its eradication:
"It has been assumed, tacitly and avowedly, directly and indirectly,
that the ultimate end of all Poetry is Truth. Every poem, it is said,
should inculcate a moral; and by this moral is the poetical merit of the
work to be adjudged... .We Bostonians, very especially, have developed
[this idea] in full." This "heresy of the didactic," as he coined it, has
"corrupt[ed] our Poetical Literature [more] than all its other enemies
combined" (_E_§_sgy_§ 75). More sympathetically, and typically, Rufus W.
Griswold explains the normative principle by which aesthetic value is
subordinate to and grounded in moral value: "Seated behind the
intelligence, and directing it, according to its capacities, conscience
is the parent of whatever is absolutely and unquestionably beautiful in
art as well as in conduct" (55).

As Michael Bell, Cathy Davidson, and others have documented, the
imputation of truth and duty upon writing led to suspicion and a good
deal of anxiety about fiction itself, which could, almost by its

definition, flout both. Fiction, whether sensational journalism or

86

novels, was thought to be a threat both to the individual and to the
social order. Thomas Jefferson, to take but a single example, reflects
in an 1818 letter the kind of anxiety many felt about the rapid growth
and dissemination of fiction: "When this poison infects the mind, it
destroys its tone and revolts against wholesome reading. . . . The result
is a bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust towards all the
real business of life" (qtd. in Bell "Arts" 7).

Not even socially acceptable until almost the end of the eighteenth
century, when novels did come to be in high demand, novelists and
publishers still sought to obscure the fictional aspect. As Cathy
(Davidson notes,

until well into the nineteenth century, virtually
every American novel somewhere in its preface or
its plot defended itself against the charge that it
_w_a_s_ a novel, either by defining itself differently
("Founded in M") or by redefining the genre
tautologically as all those things it was presumed
not to be--moral, truthful, educational, and so
forth. (40)33

The cultural context, then, can provide a basis for understanding
this aspect of the American literary establisl'ment's seemingly puzzling
reception of Poe and M: there is nothing unique in the fact that most
criticism of Poe's writing was shaped or augmented by discussion of his
life; nor is it unusual that moral evaluation weighed into most
discussions. Such is the case at least as much with the defenders of
Poe's work as those who took issue with it.

In his study of the American romance Bell demonstrates the

87

ambivalence with which each of the major writers faced their role, a
dual role balancing the moral duty of authorship with the subversive
potential of their medium. Only Poe unambiguously made, as James later
called it, the "sacrifice of relation" between poetry and truth/duty.
Underlying both his theory and artistic practice is the notion of an
autonomous imaginative authority, conceptually disinterested. In his
essay "The Poetic Principle," this is the principle. Poe thus becomes
the first and preeninant theorist to advance Kantian aesthetic theory in
America, particularly the concept of the aesthetic sense as an
autononous category.34 He defines it in "The Poetic Principle": "An
immortal instinct, deep within the spirit of man, is thus, plainly, a
sense of the Beautiful. This it is which administers to his delight in
the manifold forms, and sounds, and odours, and sentiments amid which he
exists" (76). The "moral sense" and the "pure intellect," source of
truth—perception, are distinct from the sense of the beautiful , and
require distinct forms of discourse: "The denands of truth are severe.
Ens has no sympathy with the myrtles. All that which is so
indispensable in Song, is precisely all that with which she has nothing
whatever to do" (76) . The apperception of beauty, then, is the only
proper aim of a poem. If "we look into our own souls, we
should. . .discover that under the sun there exists [nothing]. . .more
dignified-sore suprenely noble than this very poem. . .this poem which is
a poem and nothing more-this poem written solely for the poem's sake"
(75-76).35

For our purpose, we need say no more about Poe's criticism here,

accept to note that his practice accords with his theory. Clearly many

88

of the early critics were blind to the fact that moral issues are
insinuated throughout Poe's work. At the same time, as many did
recognize, the works are not oriented upon an axis of moral closure, or
upon any conventional approach to morality. To be sure, the criminal
may pay for his crime by his psychic anguish (as in "The Black Cat") or
by legal punishment ("The Tell-Tale Heart"; "The Cask of Amontillado").
The crime and its consequences may even make a story superficially
resemble a moral fable. Indeed, numerous characters--Egaeus
("Berenice"), Usher, William Wilson, Ligeia's husband—-seem to confirm
Jefferson's and others' warnings against fiction and other 'bad' habits:
they all suffer from a nervous, melancholic condition brought on by
overly-stimulating or gloomy reading, excessive "meditation," or too
little fresh air. Yet Poe's ironic treatments of both morality and
reason constitute anything but a conventional approach, in the sense
that their end is to confirm moral compensation.

For instance, a number of the stories and poems rather
surreptitiously draw the reader into the perspective of an irrational
subject, in a narrative that proffers no obvious objective lesson, but
seems, scandalously, to luxuriate in the subjective distortion or
despair (e.g., "Berenice," "U1alume"). As a second example, the
apparently rational and moral perspectives of other narrators, such as .
those of "Usher," the Dupin stories, and even m, prove inadequate to
penetrate beneath surfaces , and perhaps , as a mmmber of critics contend ,
betray a deep psychic disturbance (e.g., Barbour 66-66).

Without attmting to analyze Poe's treatment of morality:36 we

can note that James Gargano was the first to identify a fundamental

89

faulty assumption in the bulk of Poe criticism up to the "present"
(1963): the failure to recognize the ironic structure of the tales,
especially the distance between the author and his characters, in terms
of personality and verbal expression:

[Poe] often so designs his tales as to show his

narrators' limdted comprehension of their own

problems and states of mind; the structure of many

of Poe's stories clearly reveals an ironical and

comprehensive intelligence critically and

artistically ordering events so as to establish

a vision of life and character whidh the narrator's

inadequacies help to "prove." (165)

Finally, whether Poe's literature is moral, amoral, or immoral in
any sense speaks less to the issue than'how readers of the nineteenth
century perceived it. It is clear that of the varied nature of
Griswold's attacks upon Poe, it was the charge of personal immorality
that most bothered Poe's nineteenth-century defenders. This is not only
true of those personal friends, such as Sarah Helen Whitman and Thomas
H. Chivers, whose principle aim was to defend his moral integrity and
decency, but of those comung after who argued for his artistic
integrity. To the nineteenth-century reader, in general, artistic
integrity was inconceivable without moral accounting. Similarly, those
who sought to assign Poe's work the lowest grade of merit did so by
.reiterating charges of immorality, or, effectively the same, a tainted
«genius. Critics of that era who qualify Poe's genius as "analytical,"

"medhanical," or "brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat," as Whitman

90

put it, are suggesting a genius dissevered from the moral, and from
humanity itself. Some extend this logic by implicitly ascribing to
Poe's work the kind of autonomous, illicit creation of a Satan, a Comus,
or a Prospero. Van wyck Brooks is one who is explicit, describing his
"genius" as an "intelligence in and for itself felt to be a maleficent
force"; his work is "an orchid made out of chemicals. Magic is always
so. It has the sinister quality of a force operating outside nature,

without any relation to human values" (32—33).

Notes

1There has been no hard evidence discovered to back the
persistent biographical claims that in England "the rural readers are
said to have been taken in" by the "hoax, " as Hervey Allen claimed as
late as 1926 (Allen 2:419). In "Contemporary Reviews," Pollin discredits
one source, cited by Woodberry in his 1.909 biography, the memoir of
George H. Putnam, son of M's initial British publisher (47).

2All presently known American and British reviews are reproduced
in at least one of several accessible sources: Pollin's three articles,
in 1974, 1975, and 1.978, one by J. Don Vann, and items 1.5-25 of I. M.
Walker. In The Poe a, Dwight Thomas quotes fran a number of known
sources, and from one previously unknown review.

3See for instance Morison, The Oxford History of the American
People vol. 2, pp. 214-233: Polanyi, The Great Transforgagtion: Charvat,
Literagy Publishing in America 1790-1850.

4For example, the technological advance, in the cylinder press,
mechanized cloth binding, and the railroad: the exponential increase in
investment capital and banking, in its effect on the size of publishing
operations: the growth of literacy to 90% of adults by mid-century, in a
population that itself increased three-fold during those years, to 32
million by 1860.

5For a discussion of the contemporary response to "Hans Pfaall,"
see Pollin Imaginag 373-75.

572% in Pollin Imagim 388.

7James Riley, Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American
Brig Commerce (1817, rpt. five times).

8Like William Rirton and several others, the reviewer takes Poe
to task for his description of the Ariel, which, having lost its mast
and mainsail in a storm, was running "under the jib only" (see 5.1). As
a sloop, the Ariel would have a single mast, the loss of which would
mean the loss of all sails, including the jib.

9A reference to the United States Surveying and Exploring
Bbcpedition, under Captain Charles Wilkes, which departed June, 1838, and
was cannissioned to explore the South Seas, including the polar region.

10szlgartown, corrupted by Poe to "Edgarton," is a port on
Martha's Vineyard, not Nantucket (l . 1).

11Gramam's Magggine of Philadelphia, which had employed Poe in
1841-42, printed a brief review, largely summary.

91

92
12See walker, Carlson Essays, Moss Battles, A. Quinn, Nakammra.
13See Moss Battles for the best account of the principle battles.
14Reprinted in full in Carlson Recognition 28-35.

15Woodberry, Campbell, and A. H. Quinn successively discovered a
greater extent .

16Carlson, Essays 57, 55. Difficult to obtain in entirety, see
Carlson's excerpt (52-58) (containing most of the references in the
following paragraphs), and analysis and summary in A. H. Quinn
(668-676), Campbell (74-78), and Nakamura (104-110).

171m New York, poet and editor Thomas mnn English, novelist and
publisher Charles Briggs, with whom Poe had worked on Briggs' Broadway
Journal, and editor Lewis Gaylord Clark, who in the Knickerbocker
provided hostile reviews of Poe's works and attacks on his character
that exceeded Griswold's in vituperation, to name a few from just one
city.

18George Ripley, who never met Poe, praises his "extraordinary
boldness and originality," analyzing Poe's powers in short fiction, but
closely paraphrases passages of Griswold for his account of Poe's
character and motives, and for the final assessment of his writing.
While Poe might have attained "an eminent rank in literature,"
"unhappily he had no earnestness of character. . .no devotion to high
purposm-mot even the desire to produce a consummate work of art,--and
hence his writings fail of appealing to universal principles of taste,
and are destitute of truth and naturalness" (334). Ewert A. Duyckinck,
for instance, New York editor and critic, acted as his literary agent on
several occasions, and praised Poe's work "as specimens of subtle
dialectics, and the anatomy of the heart" that "evince a quickness of
apprehension, an intensity of feeling, a vigor of imagination, a power
of analysis, which are rarely seen." But after their relationship turned
sour, he merely echoed Griswold, in his own obituary essay: Poe "lived
entirely apart fran the solidities and realities of life....[H]is
writings [were] without the glow and pulse of humanity" (337).

19Lowell is an exception, largely confining his remarks to the
work, and rather noncommital on the man himself.

20P'h:l.1ip Young traces a 'Jekyll-and-Hyde' line of psychological
criticism (445-6).

21Scholars agree Poe's accusations were unfounded, and the
inflammatory exchanges between Poe from the New York Mirror and Broadway
Journal and defenders of Longfellow were calculated by him, probably to
create a stir and sell copies. For the best account of this 'battle' see
was Battles ch. 5.

22Griswold included this essay, revised by Lowell, along with his
own "Memoir" in his Works.

93

23For instance, he says both that "As a critic he has shown [a]
superior...ability," and "As a critic, Mr. Poe was aesthetically
deficient" (Carlson, Rmition 15, 1.6).

24Poe was prone to refer to transcendentalism, for instance, as a
‘virus that can "infect" a promising young author, or Boston as a "vortex
of mysticism" that can pull him in (Poe, Essays 292); and thus Emerson
could describe southerners, as he did in 1837, as barely "more civilized
than the Seminoles," and advise that the proper way to communicate with
them is to say "'Fiddle-Faddle,' in answer to every solemn remark about
'The South'" (qtd. in Hubbell, South 127). Even a hundred years later a
respected literary historian from the Nbrth could still flatly state
that "in the Old South creative living and creative speeCh were alike
impossible" (Lewisdhn 78).

25For example, see Moss Battles 235, and A. H. Quinn Passim.

26Jay Hubbel (A_merican Writers esp. chs. 2 8. 4) analyzes the
evolution of the New England canon, consisting of the 'schoolroom
poets, ' and several fiction writers (Hawthorne, Stowe), essayists
(Emerson, Holmes), and historians (Bancroft, Parkman, Prescott.) By the
1880's, as publishing and consumption patterns indicate, even the South
accepted this New England canon as national, despite the abolitionist
activism of a number of that group. As same lost prestige in the
post-Civil War decades, they were replaced by other New Ehglanders, such
as Thoreau, Howells, and James. In the meantime, those reputations that
survived—Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Hawthorne-Jeane colossal,
subordinating until well into the twentieth century non-New Englanders
that we now place in the first rank, including among others Poe,
Dblville, and Whitman, all of whom did their major work at mid-century.

2715‘or example, Griswold's first edition of The Poets _a_p_d_ Poetgy
of America, published in 1842 before animosity had developed, included
only three poems by Poe, while his Prose Writers of 115ng (1847)
included no southerner. New England's Edwin Whipple, widely regarded as
the preeminent American critic in the late nineteenth century, said
little about Poe, granting him "original capacity," but pronouncing him
"cursed by an incurable perversity of character" (qtd. in Hubbel,
American Writers 37) . Thms Wentworth Higginson thought Poe's criticism
worthless and his fiction "broken and disfigured by all sorts of
inequalities and imitation and stucco," the result of "a propensity to
disguise and falsify, to claim knowledge he did not possess, to invent
quotations and references." He contrasts the fiction with Hawthorne's
"solid masonry," and Poe's "want of true integrity" with Hawthorne's
"austere virtue," the "best soil of genius" (Carlson, Rmition 76).
Poe fared no better in most of the early literary histories. Granted
originality and usually "genius," the praise is qualified, the
discussion usually brief. American Literagy Masters (1906), while giving
Poe a full chapter, typically describes him as "impulsive," "perverse,"
"malevolent," etc., and defines his "genius [as] essentially
journalistic," his work written without awareness of "the influence his

94

paragraphs will produce the week after next" (Vincent 199, 201). In his
widely read and influential American Prose Masters (909) Will' C.
Brownell dismisses Poe's work as artificial and sensational. «RE cult
of Poe is not in the interest of literature, since as literature his
writings are essentially valueless."

28Barrett Wendell, A Literary Historygf America (1900); eds.
Edwin Anderson Alderman, et. al., Library of Southern Literature v. 9,
p. 908): ed. Curtis Hidden Page, The Chief American Ti'oets (1905).

29Most prominently Swinburne (1875), Shaw (1919), Lawrence
(1923), and George Saintsbury (1933): Mallarme (1876, 1883), Valery
(1921), and Marie Bonaparte (1933): and Dostoevsky (1861). See Carlson,
Rmition and Critical Essays: for others, see Alexander.

30For further discussion of these facts and the few documents
that yield them, see chapter four below.

31Harry Levin first suggested Em as a source (Memories 42).

32Compare to m:
The range of vapour to the southward had arisen
prodigously in the horizon, and began to assume
more distinctness in form. I can liken it to
nothing but a limitless cataract, rolling silently
into the sea from some immense and far-distant
rampart in the heaven. The gigantic curtain ranged
along the the whole extent of the southern
horizon. . .A sullen darkness now hovered above us.
(25:12-13)

33For discussion of censure of fiction in early America, see
Ciarvat, Origins, esp. chs 2, 7; Bell, Development, esp. ch. 1; Cathy
mfldsml esp. Ch. 3.

34Poe's knowledge of Kantian theory was filtered through his
reading of the French Enlightenment philosopher Victor Cousins , whose
writings on aesthetics were drawn essentially unaltered fram Kant's
Critige of Judgm. t. At present, there is no indication that Poe read
Kant directly.

35The same principle informs the "Analytic of the Beautiful," the
first book of Kant's Critigge of Judggnt. Biefly,
In order to distinguish whether anything is
beautiful or not, we refer the representation, not
by the understanding to the object for cognition,
but by the imagination (perhaps in conjunction with
the understanding) to the subject and its feeling
of pleasure or pain. The judgment of taste is
therefore not a judgment of cognition, and is
consequently not logical but aesthetical, by which
we understand that whose determining ground can be

no other than subjective (sc 1, 379).

95

Section four contrasts this with "satisfaction" "bound up with

interest":
Whatever by means of reason pleases through the
mere concept is good. That which pleases only as a
means we call good for something (the useful), but
that WhiCh pleases for itself if ggod in itself. In
both there is always involved the concept of a
purpose, and consequently the relation of reason to
the (at least possible) volition, and thus a
satisfaction in the presence of an object or an
action, i.e. some kind of interest (380).

36This is the aim, in whole or part, of studies too numerous to
name here. However, it is a special concern of Thompson in Poe's
Fiction.

Chapter Three

"A Language from the Depths": Psychological Models

1

Context

The biographically—oriented criticism that characterized the first
hundred years of Poe cammentary did not come to an end with the
emergence of New Critical scholarship. Rather it continued in the form
of psychoanalysis, extending in its initial phase the same logic that
the key to understanding Poe's work was Poe himself , with particular
reference to mental soundness. In a literary culture that was slow to
embrace psychoanalysis, Poe early became, and remains, the most popular
subject for psychoanalytic criticism. Poe biography became .
psychobiography in the early twentieth century, either incorporating
psychoanalytic insights, such as Hervey Allen's Israfel: The Life

and Times of Edgy Allan Poe (1926) and N. Bryllion Fagin's The
Histrionic Mr. Poe (1949), or outright psychoanalyses of Poe,

including John W. Robertson's Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycholggical Study
(1922), Joseph Wood Krutch's Edggr Allan Poe: A Study in Genius
(1926), Marie Bonaparte's Edgar Poe: Etude myfiifle (1933,
translated in 1949 as The Life and Works of Edgg Allan Poe: A

fiycho—Analflic Integpretation), and D. M. Rein's Edgg Allan Poe:
The Inner Pattern (1960).

97

The studies of PM that fit within the rubric of a psychological
approach are wide-ranging, including any reading that perceives Pym's
voyage as a symbolic projection of some inward, mental journey. The
subject of analysis may be Poe himself, or the text, for the psychic
types and laws that are at work within it. Pym may be 'psychoanalyzed'
as if he were Poe, as if he had his own individuality and psyche, or as
if he were an archetype representing universal human experience. The
outward journey may be seen as a dream, a ritualistic journey of
initiation, a voyage to death and the afterworld, down to the
underworld, or back to the womb, or simply a fictive rather than
metaphorical journey across the world as a field against which psychic
laws work out the subject's destiny--or of course as some combination of
these. In any case, an ulterior reality is envisioned, one which
ultimately refers to the psyche. Despite frequent treatment elsewhere
as a separate category, even Jungian-organized myth readings are built
on fundamental psychoanalytic principles, as was Jung's archetypal
theory itself.

Throughout this apparent diversity, we find that these studies are
most naturally organized in relation to psychoanalysis, in which plot is
seen as driven by sale kind of psychic determinism of author or
character that accords with Freud ' 3 structure. The most important is
French psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte's Life and Works, translated in
1949. To say, as Douglass Robinson does, that all subsequent readings
of M were "reaction to or expansion of her reading" for the subsequent
decade is certainly an overstatement ("Reading" 48). Studies by Harry
Levin, Sydney Kaplan and Edward Davidson stand out even today for their

breadth and originality, not for their engageIent with psychoanalysis or

98

Bonaparte. Nonetheless her study has been profoundly influential well
beyond the nineteen-fifties.

Beyond that of any other American literary subject, we can speak of
a remarkable relationship between Poe and Freud. While other approaches
emerge and disappear with changing critical priorities, psychoanalysis
as it has pertained to Poe studies has proven adaptable and has
sustained its relevance. It will occupy an important place in the final
chapters, in part because forms of this and derivative approaches, such
as Jungian-archetypal, continue, and because certain features of
psychoanalysis have become so deeply ingrained as to be almost
inseparable from our understanding of Poe.

Poe himself, by his intensive focus upon the mental state in
moments of crisis, suffering, and illness directs his reader's mind to
the psyche. At times he almost seems to be presenting his narrators as
patients or case studies. As Clive Bloam puts it, "one reason for
psychoanalysis' fascination with. Poe is that Poe conceives of a world
which is a mirror image of Freud's own" (8). Indeed, his attention to
problems of self and identity, represented for instance in the use of
doubles, or in the dissolution or fragmentation of the individual
identity, pref igure a psychic structure which resembles that conceived
by Freud and Jung far more than it does the philosophical constructs of
Locke and Hegel current in his own day.

If psychoanalytic criticism grew logically and chronologically out
of biographical criticism, there is a key difference: critical
recognition of the dynamic of the unconscious in Poe's work marks the
central watershed in the history of Poe and 13m studies. The early

simplistic judgments that Poe's writing was the product of genius or,

99

conversely, a diseased imagination is not explanation but elision of the
strange or ulterior in his work. Shoshona Felman suggests that certain
key words in earlier criticism that purported critical judgment--"magic"
or "magnetism" as metaphors for the ingenuity of his verse, for
instance-indicate contradiction and denial of the irrational in Poe's
work that itself resembles a psychoanalytic effect (137).

Psychoanalysis provided an applicable structure, one moreover with the
prestige of scientific authority, which gave dimension to, and permitted
analysis of, the ulterior realm recognized in Poe's work--whether that
realm is of the dreamworld, the supernatural, or a mental state pushed
beyond same extreme. The permanent legacy of psychoanalytic criticism
of Poe is the opening it created for "the possibility of a dialogue with
unreason," as Foucault put it, in reference to the work of artists with
a similar imaginative cammitment, such as Holderlin and Raymond Roussel
(Madness 198). Criticism, then, has juxtaposed Poe and Freud for the
reflexive support they offer in their canton endeavor to create a space
and a discourse for unconscious desire.

Eat the relationship is not only one of mutual support. As
inviting as the texts are for symbol analysis, they ultimately elude the
analyst's explanation. Foucault might have been speaking of Poe when he
said of Raymond Roussel, "His is a language that cues to us from the
depths of a night that is perfectly clear and impossible to dominate"
(qtd. in Racevskis 4.9). Freud himself, in his endorserent of
Bonaparte's camprehensive, exhaustive attempt, sounds almost apologetic
in admitting "investigations such as this do not claim to explain
creative genius" (Bonaparte xi). Yet repeatedly psychoanalysts return

to Poe, only to confront the product of mental processes that are beyond

100

their grasp, meanwhile conferring "a status that other authors do not
have" (Bloom 3).

Critics have came to recognize that Poe interrogates
Freud as much as Freud does Poe--as Clive Bloom suggests in his book
entitled Reading Poe Reading Freud. Inevitably, psychoanalytic critics
will perforce see the text as a situation for or of analysis. Thus
Lacan calls "The Purloined letter" a "fable of psychoanalysis": and
Derrida says derisively that wherever it looks, "psychoanalysis
always... refinds itself" (173). As critics of Bonaparte and Lacan,
such as Derrida, Clive Bloom, and Shoshona Felman have shown, just as
the therapist-analyst becomes a participant in the patient's situation by
the mechanisms of transference and countertransference, the
critic-analyst becames enveloped in the frame of the subject of analysis
(Clive Bloom 2). The frame of the text grows for each cmmentator,
whose analysis encampasses the role of analyst played by previous
camentators. These lose in succession their positions of power outside
the frame, much as the characters of "The Purloined letter" do their's,
as the letter changes hands. Only Poe's position is enhanced, as
engineer and master analyst, his own text unmastered. This irony might
not have surprised Freud, who regarded psychoanalysis as a latecomer,
and acknowledged that his concepts were anticipated by artists.

A fundamental variation within the psychoanalytic approach to Poe
is in the aim and object of the criticism. Over time we observe a shift
in the object of analysis: from psychoanalyzing the author, to content
or character. If in the former the text is read as symptomatic data, in
the latter it is recognized as a representatim of a psychological

situation, the author's awareness of which may vary. Critics have

101

acceded progressively greater awareness, control and prescience to Poe
in his representation of the psychology of his characters.

Both the proto-psychological studies and the earliest
psychoanalyses find within the text and the thin and often inaccurate
biographical record evidence of symptoms, on the basis of which various
diagnoses of Poe are rendered. These ranged from "hereditary
psychopat " and "epileptic" to victim of a "brain lesion" and of
alcohol- or drug-induced "mental disease."1 Joseph Wood Krutch
developed an early influential definition of Poe's condition: his work
reveals a neurotic "removal from reality," and sexual impotency, brought
about by a fixation on the mother, which stood between him and a normal
life. Krutch's work, characterized by conjecture and extravagance, was
soon thoroughly discredited. 2

Yet Bonaparte's study, while reflecting a superior understanding of
both psychoanalytic theory and Poe's life and work, used essentially the
same approach and came to similar, if more elaborate conclusions. Like
Krutch, she makes no conceptual distinction between artwork and dreams.
Even in a chapter titled "Literature: Its Function and Elaboration,"
her discussion [of literary production is a comparison based entirely
upon similarity between art on one hand and on the other dreams ,
symptans and other manifestations of unconscious impulse-as in "Like
our dreams, works of art. . .represent a sort of safety valve for the
repressed instincts" (209). While she clearly believed, along with
Freud, that the conscious was involved in its creation, she finds no
basis for conceptualizing it within the framework of
psychoanalysis-wutside of which she does not stray. We must settle for

a very few, mystical statelents about either the artistic genius or the

102

interaction of the conscious and unconscious: "There are men with a
mysterious gift who can clothe. . .instinctual gratifications in forms
which allow others, also, to dream their dreams with them. How this is
done is an aesthetic problem still unsolved" (664).

Bonaparte's study was criticized on a number of grounds, and we
will examine some of them later in the chapter. we line in particular,
however, faulted her for failing to discriminate between Poe and his
characters, smoothly attributing, for instance, Pym's compulsive
movements toward the mother symbols (ship, sea, and South Pole) to both
Pym and Poe-sometimes as "Poe-Pym." Unquestioningly she assumes that
the connection between Poe and these characters is unconscious and
itself campulsive, rather than artistic.

Subsequent studies by Davidson, Patrick Quinn, and Allen Tate,
among others, portray a very different relation between the artist and
his work. While each considered Poe's life relevant more or less, their
discussion of the formal elements, philosophical integrity, and
aesthetic sophistication all suggest an artist in absolute and minute
control of his materials. The relation between conscious artistry and
unconscious content in Poe's work, implicit in these studies, was the
focus of two widely-read studies of 1963, James Gargano's "The Question
of Poe's Narrators," and Floyd Stovall's "The Conscious Art of Edgar
Allan Poe. " Gargano establishes on the basis of formal evidence the
superiority and therefore the distinction of the authorial in relation
to the narratorial consciousness. Responding to the psychoanalytic
criticism, Stovall wryly suggests that we "should not suspect the
betrayal of the author's unconscious self until [we] understand all that

the conscious self has to contribute" (178). He correlates Poe's

103

critical theory and his poetry to support the claim that the latter was
the "product of a healthy and alert intelligence" (178). Psychological
and psydhoanalytic readings with this basic perception of Poe's relation
to his work, such as that of Paul Rosensweig and Sybil Wuletich-Brinberg
tend to psychoanalyze a character, with little or no reference to Poe
himself. Implied in these analyses is an author with prescient,
sophisticated understanding of psychic processes.

Receding in the height of the New Critical academic environment,
and perhaps subsumed within a surge of Jungian and myth interpretation
through the nineteen-sixties and -seventies, psychoanalytic criticism of
Poe reemerged in the -eighties.

The continued relevance of psydhoanalytic study of Poe is most
evident in the 1988 publication of The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida
3g Psychoanalfiic Reading, which collects same of the articles in a
substantial, ongoing debate in poststructural American theory (Muller
and Richardson). In these readings Poe moves fram Bonaparte's couch, so
to speak, to any of several positions of power. In his "Seminar on the
'The Purloined Letter'" (1956), Jacques Lacan suggests that Poe has
written a sort of elaborate parable of psychoanalysis.3 In the
oedipal situation, prohibition and displacement have enabled the child
to negotiate the conflicting demands of the pleasure- and reality
principles, directing his libido into a gender role and extra—familial
relations. If this fails, a psychoanalyst may be able to accompliSh
this later through transference, in which the patient unconsciously
identifies the analyst as the parental figure his psydhic conflict
involves--and so works through it.

Lacan accepts the basic oedipal symiolic structure of the story as

104

Bonaparte articulated it: In stealing the compromising letter,
ostensibly for blackmail of the Queen, the Minister has possessed
himself of the Queen, or mother, violating the incest prohibition, and
gaining an advantage in the struggle with the King/father. The letter is
a phallus, representing power for its possessor: as a signifier, the
letter also "represents" an absence--as indeed the "maternal phallus"
does, according to Freud. The Minister has "displaced" the King/father,
_and Dupin steps into the Minister's original place as son to repeat the
Oedipal struggle, including a second purloining. In restoring the
still-undisclosed letter to the Queen, Dupin resecures the power of both
King and Queen. In terms of the parable, he is the psydhoanalyst who
has intervened to restore familial/social harmony.

In his theft, the Minister initiates a series of displacements of
the letter, in a Chain, or circuit, that leads back to the Queen.
According to Lacan, Poe undermines two fundamental epistemological
assumptions: first, the security of representation: each time»the
letter/signifier Changes hands its signification changes. In the
Queen's it signifies her concealed desire: in the Minister's her
vulnerability and'his power, and so forth. Thus the letter functions
only as a signifier of other signifiers. Secondly, the idea of a stable
subject is challenged, as characters assume each others' places in the
repeating oedipal triangles:

'What Freud discovered and rediscovers... is that the

displacement of the signifier determines the subjects in their
acts, in their destiny, in their refusals, in their blindness,
in their end and in their fate, their innate gifts and social

acquisitions notwithstanding, without regard for character or

105

sex, and that, willingly or not, everything that might be

considered the stuff of psychology, kit and cahoodle, will

follow the path of the signifier (43-44).
Lacan's analysis implicitly challenges Bonaparte's reading. First and
most obvious is the paradigm shift implicit in Lacan's focus upon the
text over the author. Against Bonaparte's condescending diagnosis of a
"sick" Poe, Lacan foregoes discussion of Poe's background, personality,
or intentionality. He analyzes Dupin, as Poe's surrogate analyst, but
leaves the author outside his frame of reference, the master analyst
whose story has something to teach us.

Both see campulsive repetition as the dynamic driving the action.
But while Bonaparte tries to elucidate the signified that is repeated in
so many ways (Poe's unconscious fantasy about returning to his mother),
for Lacan what is primary is the sign itself and the "symbolic order
which is contitutive for the subject." The repetition is "the itinerary
of the signifier" in a series of displacements, and the reorientation
the surrounding subjects receive (29).

In his response to Lacan, in "The t’ttrveyor of Truth" (1975),
Jacques Derrida elaborates an argument based on Lacan's supposed failure
to "frame" the story: Lacan is apparently oblivious to the distinctions
between author and narrator, and story and narration, and to the
relevance of the epigrams and the allusive anecdotal material preceding
and following the two successive oedipal triangles of the main action.
Wat Lacan concealed behind the clarity of the two triangles, Derrida
exposes: an ever-widening frame of discourse. Derrida points to an
"infinitely regressive reference to previous writing," constituting the

"crumbly, abyssal, non-totalizable edges of the story's frame, " in

106

Barbara Johnson's words (Muller 233). In not framing the story, he
fails to realize the "unframeability" of the story; or the links by
whiCh it is connected to previous and future texts-—for instance the
discourse of psychoanalytic theory, which, says Derrida, "finds
itself/is found" in Poe's text. Ontological truth-claims which underlay
Lacan's analysis of the signifier, above all the oedipal situation
itself, Lacan leaves concealed and unexamuned "beyond the writing"--of

Poe's story, of Lacan's text, and presxmptuously, of language itself.

2

Bonaparte and Psychoanalysis: Poe as Patient

In her massive psychobiography, Marie Bonaparte provided an
enduring contribution to the study of 3m. She regarded this work as
the most penetrating of the Poe canon in revealing the psyche of its
author, and in her sixty page 13m chapter we have not only the first
sophisticated psychoanalysis, but the first thorough, profound analysis
of any kind. She is the first to posit a theory of multiple meanings,
in her reading of an unconscious subtext: "Though on the surface, a
literary work relates a manifestly coherent story, intertwined with it
and, simultaneously, another and secret story is being told which is the
basic theme. . . in which the preconscious and unconscious proper, are
simultaneously at work" (654). In the area of psychoanalytic biography
and criticism, it remains an important standard, for its thoroughness,
its fidelity to classical Freudian theory, and its insight.

Bonaparte does not claim theoretical originality, but only strict

107

application of Freudian principles. She develops a hermeneutic implicit
in Freud by categorizing literature as one of a number of forms of
manifestation of preconscious or repressed memory and desire--suCh as
dreams and jokes. Freud's correlation of the literary work and the
dream particularly interests her. Though Freud never prescribed a
methodology of practical criticisme-and perhaps because he did
not-~Bonaparte's practice exploits his detailed discussions on the
symbolism.of dreams, unquestioningly transposing this structure as a
totality upon the literary text.

She draws conclusions about Poe from his texts in two ways: first,
by analyzing the symbolism,of the text in a way analogous to dream
analysis; and second, by analyzing the behavior of the character she
regards as the author's persona, for symptoms that are then
(inexplicably) attributed along with a diagnosis to Poe himself. we
must add that these are built upon a third basis of information, Poe's
biography, whiCh is analyzed for cause or origin (suCh as the death.of
his mother when he was age two), and effect or symptom (abnormal
relations with.women in adulthood.)

Bonaparte believes that Poe was in the grip of a "sadonecrophilic"
campulsion set into motion by the early memory of his mother's sickness
and death. Both his life and his work reflect the repetitive fantasy of
a return to that setting, which arrested the oedipal complex in
incompletion. In gym, for instance, "the whole content of this story.. .
is the ardent and frenzied searchs-ever frustrated, ever renewed-for
the lost mother: a mother, always hidden, always present and made
manifest here in those vast and universal symbols whose significance is

unconsciously sensed by man" (312). Freud suggests that the oedipal

108

complex normally works to separate life and death instincts in the
service of life: the diffuse libido is channeled into genital sexuality
and extrafamilial relations: the death instinct into aggression against
the father and other rivals.

This lack of separation of eros and death in Poe's case led to a
number of abnormalities, such as the tendency to see in real women, and
create in fictional wamen, mother-figures, and the tendency, despite his
attraction, toward sadistic aggression against them (repressed in the
real wanen, sublimated in his art.)4 At the same time, he recoiled
from the sensual in both his life and work. Spiritual or idealized love
daninates in place of the erotic, for the pregenital stage at which his
libido development was arrested led to a preference for "womb fantasies"
(such as in the premature burial images) over evocations of copulation
in his work.

Her analyses of Poe's stories and poems .beginand end with
symbol interpretation. While nowhere does she define the term symbol,
she uses it not on the basis of a literary theory, but strictly as Freud
does, as an unconscious psychological process. The symbol is a
transformation of unconscious energy into a discernible form. According
to Freud, interpretation is possible because the unconscious manifests
itself in a symbolic system very much like a language.

As in all of Poe's work she finds the mother symbolism permeating
m. The sea, "the primordial earth state," predaminates here, with
the universal deep spell it casts on humans, and its suggestion of
amniotic fluid. But the ships (especially the floating shipwrecks), the
South Pole, the dog Tiger, the island Tsalal, etc. also hear this

meaning, each suggesting or offering a different subjective aspect for

109

Pym of the mother's body, object of his relentless drive. The floating
wreck of the Grampus, from whose womblike hold Pym has emerged, suggests
the frailty of his mother's body. It fails both as a secure vessel
(i.e. , the mutiny and the wreck) and as a source of nourishment, as the
meager items of food Pym retrieves are inadequate.

The island is the aspect her body would present to a fetus. Its
landscape from Pym's point of view mixes images suggesting the
wamb/birth canal and the intestinal tract. The darkness of the
surroundings and inhabitants, rivers that flow, bloodlike, in purple
"veins," the inhumation of Pym and Peters, and their wanderings through
channels and chasms, finally to emerge into the white world of the polar
region-all reflect an idea of the fetus' experience, including the
supposed confusion in the infantile perception of the vaginal and the
cloacal. The "Tekeli-li" creature, with its long milk-white body,
"silky" hair, red claws and teeth, suggests the mother with respect to
the incest prohibition, both in its potentially-castrating teeth and
taboo status on Tsalal. Bonaparte is careful to point out that the
placement and dispersal of the mother symtol, "always hidden, always
present," is not logical, but a consequence of Poe's supposed fixation:
objects throughout Poe-Pym's field of perception take on the coloration
of this and similar "universal symbols" (312).

The many other symbolic objects cluster around one of several other
figures of the oedipal situation. For example, weak father figures and
authority figures appear throughout the narrative, only to be, rather
easily, "overthrown" and/or supplanted in succession: Pym assumes an
adult male disguise to foil his Grandfather Peterson, whose sudden

appearance threatens Pym' 8 plans: successive leaders of the Grampus are

110

overthrown, Augustus' father Captain Barnard, by mutiny, and the chief
mutineer by Pym and Dirk Peters; Captain Guy forfeits some of his
authority to Pym, and is himself destroyed by the chief of Tsalal, who
in turn is killed by the crew of the Jane ng. The pattern of revolt
and removal, according to Bonaparte reflectsin general the "primal
horde" of patricidal brothers described in Freud's Totemand Taboo.
'More particularly, they represent Poe's fantasy of success in his
rivalry with the father, in contrast to his actual youth, Characterized
by physical abandonment in his early Childhood by father David Poe, and
personal rejection and financial abandonment in his adolescence by
foster father John Allan.

The dispersed symbols converge in the climactic final Chapter. The
polar environment, with its milky water, its warm snow and its presiding
large, white figure, "the great maternal divinity" according to
Bonaparte, concentrate the positive and negative features of Poe's
experience with his own mother: coldness, death, warmth and milk. In
the "embraces of the cataract " (Poe's words), we also have the
"consummation" of the fantasy reunion that was doubly prevented for the
child Poe by the incest prohibition and her premature death (350). And
in that final ersatz Bible quotation, which.has puzzled other critics,
Bonaparte sees Poe's proclamation of victory over the father: "I have
graven it within the‘hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the
rock" (Note.9).

While the influence of Bonaparte's reading has been widespread,
implicit, and often unacknowledged, as we will see, criticism of her
methods and conclusions has came from many quarters, and has often been

pointed. Reductiveness comes up repeatedly. Gilles Deleuze refers to

111

the "critical impoverishment" of the rewriting of "whole, rich and
random multiple meanings" of the literary text into the same oedipal
narrative (qtd. in Jameson 22). Mario Praz complains of the theoretical
looseness in the use of dream interpretive techniques to analyze
literature: such concepts as "condensation" of symbolic meaning,
"scission" (dispersal of the symbol), etc. , give Bonaparte room to find
in almost any object or episode meanings which will conform to her
thesis. In his essay specifically on Bonaparte's reading of 2m, Roger
Forclaz makes the same point when he finds tautological reasoning at the
core of her methodology: "the work [_Py1_m] is adduced to diagnose Poe's
necrophilia, impotence, sadism: this 'fact' about Poe is then used to
interpret the work" (190).

Bonaparte's methods of scholarship are suspect on several grounds.
She shares with much early Poe criticism a tendency to accept
questionable 'facts, ' and dubious biographical sources. She also subtly
begins to use diagnostic inferences she has drawn as fact. She
campounds this problem when such inferences build upon each other in a
causal chain. For instance, she offers an elaborate psychosexual
explanation of Poe's opium use, as an external sexual prohibition,
sparing him the anxiety of his "inner prohibition which banned
erection." The inner prohibition, in turn, relates to his supposed
sexual impotency and to the "sexless" content of his stories (397).
Thus several dubious suppositions with their origins in legend rather
than biography. are taken as granted and used to reinforce each other.

Underlying sale of the statements critical of psychoanalytic
criticism is the psychoanalytic correlation of art and neurosis.

Bonaparte's study assumes that the mechani- that operate in dreaming

112

and recounting the dream, and those involved in literary creation are
the same. She simply attributes to Poe symptoms his characters display,
and crimes they commit as Poe's own latent or repressed wishes.

In answer to the considerable criticism directed at Bonaparte, Neal
Bruss rose to her defense in his "The Discourse of _Pm and Marie
Bonaparte's analysis of Poe" (1972). He acknox-Iledges basic
flaws in her methodology: it is based upon the imposition of
interpretive strategies extrinsic to fiction, and upon "notionalistic"
symbol interpretation committed to analysis of a signified phallocentric
structure. But instead of interrogating conclusions one therefore
supposes would be suspect, he aims rather to buttress them with firmer
textual evidence--intrinsic, quantifiable, semantic. The result is an
unoriginal, rather superficial linguistic analysis, but one bulging with
statistics.

He isolates three conclusions fundamental to Bonaparte's thesis
(for instance, the boy-in-womb "motif"), and a stylistic form of
evidence for each (which Bonaparte has already provided), and then
enumerates and categorizes its incidence. For example, phrases
describing potentially womb-like interior space, including "within" and
"inside," occur forty-five times, while phrases involving descent into
enclosing substances such as water or a ship's interior occur 106 times.
Finding an "intense latent network" supporting Bonaparte's claim of "the
unconscious theme of motherhood, " Bruss inadvertently grounds his own
argument in the signified. The only distinguishing feature of Bruss's
analysis--the enumerations--is undercut by the point his essay makes in
spite of himself, that the evocative power of an image or turn of phrase

has little to do with its frequency of occurrence.

113
Permutations of Psychoanalysis

In a brief, recent essay "Mourning in Poe's 3m" (1992), more
suggestive than explicative, Grace Farrell grants Bonaparte's view that
m is 'about' Poe's search for his personal mother. However, refining
her own earlier Jungian approach (discussed below), she argues that
Pym's quest, and the mourning process in general, must not be
conceptualized as pathological, but a healthy impulse toward adjustment
to a personal world that has changed profoundly. As conscious art, she
argues, gm stands as a satiric repudiation of the mourning rites
associated with the nineteenth-century idealization of death, jarring
the reader with the phenomenology and trauma of death, registering its
egregious failure to accommodate his grief (see Kennedy 133e, discussed
in chapter six).

On the unconscious level, Poe was dramatizing, not ego-regression
and loss of self, but the healthy confronting of death. Drawing on the
work of John Bowlby on the mourning psychology of children, she argues
that as our identity is shaped in part by living others, the bereaved
seeks out the lost loved one through memory as part of his/her own
development of self. Poe's case was particularly urgent because of
nature and timing of the loss. (He was two.) He had to 'find' his
mother again before he could do what all children must, that is separate
from her and grow as a self: "The goal of mourning is to search for the
Other in order to find the self--to ererge reborn out of the death

experience" (Kopley Poe's 116). The lack of closure in the text

 

reflects the failure of the search, a claim of Bonaparte's Lee grants.
The text "leaves Pym where Poe remained: repetitively poised on the

boundary between loss and recovery" (116) .

114

In his "The Search for Identity: The Enclosure Motif in me
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" (1980), Paul Rosensweig offersa
tightly-drawn psychological reading which implicitly identifies Pym as a
kind of autobiographical projection of Poe on the psychological
level--for instance, attributing Poe's childhood experiences to Pym
(without textual authorization), as a way of explaining Pym's actions.
He links Pym's failure to develop a stable identity with the infantile
traumata of the gradual deterioration and death of Elizabeth Arnold Poe.
Rosensweig establishes Pym's psychological instability both by the way
in which his ego dissolves into doubles throughOut the narrative, and by
his own statically weak sense of self. Unable to grow, Pym - s doomed
campulsively to return to the infantile scene, concentrated in the
narrative into symbols of the wcmb and the moment of birth, in an effort
at resolution. The narrative recycles the same pattern: First, he
escapes fram a stressful situation to enter a wunblike enclosure--
Augustus' bedroom, the Gra_mpus ' hull , the fissure and then the chasms on
Tsalal, to name a few. Related are numerous '1ines' of security
suggesting an umbilicus, such as the lines that connect him to Augustus'
cabin from the stowage, and that secure him as he dives for food into
the submerged campartments of the wrecked W. Second, as in the
case of his mother, the initial security and nourishment these provide
eventually fail: the lines break, the enclosures become confining and
terrifying, the food putrifies.

In a sophisticated and novel reading, "Blank Hallucinations in the
Fiction of Poe and Hemingway" (1967), Raymond Tarbox postulates
a direct correlation between certain elements in the fiction of

Hemingway and Poe (especially m), and findings in recent clinical

115

research on hallucination patterns in sleep and half-sleep states.
Certain individuals prone to a depressed or weak mental state, such as
Poe and Hemingway (and some of their characters), will occasionally
experience one or more of these hallucinations. He discusses several ;
the one most relevant to his reading of PM is the 'Isakower mass. ' Otto
Isakower described the mass as a visual and tactile sensation at the
sleep-wake border "of something shadowy and indefinite, generally felt
to be round, which comes nearer, swells to gigantic size and threatens to
crush the subject" (qtd. in Tarbox 314). Accompanied by a "yearning for
engulfment," it is a composite image of the mother's face and breast,
infantile memory traces representing food and security, and defensively
displacing the stressful situation.

The Isakower hallucination, Tarbox suggests, might explain a series
of key dreamlike images in M: The big dog Tiger, suddenly appearing
in the stowage and nearly smothering a delighted Pym, the cliffside on
Tsalal, over which he "had a longing to fall," and the white shrouded
phantom standing over the "chasm [which] threw itself open to receive
us" (24.14). But it is the cyclic patterns surrounding these images
that fleshes out Tarbox's interpretation. According to Isakower, the
hallucinator generally experiences a sense of disappointment and then
dread toward the Isakower mass, causing him to abandon it, only to
repeat the cycle. Citing Bonaparte in noting the importance of weak
father/authority figures with which Pym tries to identify, Tarbox
suggests the larger pattern: Pym fixes upon several father figures in
succession, each not only failing him (as Poe's real and foster fathers
failed him), but leaving him in great distress. Resorting to the

Isakower hallucination, Pym abandons this too when it, like Poe's real

116

mother, fails him, becoming itself a source of dread or danger. Pym
then moves on to another father figure. In no aspect does Tarbox's
reading contradict Bonaparte's; rather he updates it with evidence from
research unavailable to her, fulfilling well his carefully delimited
aim.

In her The Rationale of the Uncanny (1988), Sybil Wuletich—Brinberg
takes an approach unique in psychoanalytic criticism of Poe, for it is
the only extended Freudian analysis to focus upon the alter ego over the
mother. _ She complains that many of Poe's scholars "who profess an
appreciation for Poe's literary achievement do not confront the
irrational in his work" (29), and she exploits Freud's theory of the
uncanny as a means of confronting it herself .5 It is a promising study
in the new line of inquiry that it opens, but rather disappointing in
its applications, especially in the 33 chapter, in which she simply
abandons her thesis and offers a vague, unoriginal synthesis of previous
readings as her own.

In his essay "The Uncanny," Freud sought a psychological
explanation for the sense of weirdness or "creeping horror" which we
feel toward certain phenolena that do not of themselves seem to offer a
threat (Freud 17:219). He cites a wide range of phenomena toward which
we react in similar ways--an unnerving sense of dread, a "creeping
horror" : dolls, waxwork figures, and other automatons, doubles,
corpses, dismemberment, coincidence, the "evil eye" effect of an intense
stare from the wrong person, supernatural effects and hauntings, certain
manifestations of insanity, such epileptic seizures, and compulsive or
autolatic repetitions. These are Freud's illustrations, yet one could

hardly form a more representative gloss of Poe's fiction. What Freud

117
found in comon among these is that they all suggest familiar objects
seemingly animated by an unfamiliar agency, demonic or meChanical. To
Freud the uncanny effect is an irruption of the repressed fear of
dehumanization, that we ourselves are meChanical in essence, and
vulnerable to disintegration.

In his analysis of the uncanny effect Freud found the double, as
manifested in both psyChopathology and art, to be central, and drew upon
Otto Rank's study, "The Doppelganger." Rank argued that the double
arises from the pre-oedipal narcissistic stage. At this stage, Rank
speculated, the double arises as an "insurance against destruction of
ego, a denial of death." Beyond this stage, this "other" force,
substitute for theumother/world, becomes integrated into the self of the
normal individual, as the "special faculty" able to criticize and
censor, and assists in social adjustment-~the superego, in Freudian
terms. However "in the pathological case of delusions of being watChed
this mental institution becomes isolated, dissociated from the ego"
(Rank, qtd. in‘Wuletich-Brinberg 34). Projected outward, the individual
perceives the double as ghastly and menacing, threatening division,
interchange, or disintegration of identity. Responses to the double and
to the uncanny in general, both in pathology and in art, are
dehumanization, megalomania, and paranoia--all riChly present throughout
Poe's work.

Despite the riCh.implications, this material is ignored in her
analyses of the individual stories to which.mmch of this material is so
relevant, such as "William Wilson" and The Narrative ofgggthur Gordon
22g, for instance. Mbst of her insights are in the general remarks in

the introductory chapters, where she notes that "Poe's work expresses

118

terror in the discovery that at the core of being a mechanical essence
that implicitly debunks metaphysics, the sensuous world, and art" (49).

Her confused discussion of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
indicates that, like other critics, she found this work more baffling
than any she writes about. There are numerous curious statements of
dubious logic that are made in isolation of either evidence or
ramifications: that "Pym is absolutely sincere in wanting to
distinguish his style from his editor's, but his lack of self-awareness
prevents him from realizing how similar their styles are": that "Pym and
Poe are one and the same person and that their identity is confirmed by
Pym's naming E. A. Poe his editor" (191) (strangely contradicted by two
pages of discussion of them as separate characters, from which no point
unfolds): and that the Tsalalians are "irrational," and guilty‘of the
"crime? of "prejudging everyone and everything white as hostile and
evil" (The Tsalalians are shadow and object, not substance, and to
speculate on a Tsalalian inner self is misguided at least.) These are
just a few examples; coherence and style visibly deteriorate over the
course of the essay. It seems to be an especially clear example of the
way in which the narrative has often 'infected' a critical statement
with its own qualities of disjunction, assymetry, tendentious
extravagance, and apparent lack of control .

The only cogent point to be coaxed out of her discussion of m,
involving Pym's inner conflict, is not in itself extravagant. The
Narrative is one of a group of negating stories in which "death and
aggression seem to radiate from the souls of his characters" (18].).

Pym himself has a "thinness of consciousness" that prevents "a

deep understanding of human nature" (189, 191). His inner

119

conflict-—unconscious to him--involves his innocent, affirming

self, which is his conscious sense of himself, and his negating

or demonic self, of which he is never aware. The negating self finds
its expression over the field of his adventures: in the tendency

to mistrust and judge others excessively harsh, in his impersonation
of Rogers' corpse, in his resort to cannibalism, and the
"quasi-pornographic imagination" revealed in his description

of the cannibal feast as "exquisite." Pym's failure of imagination
is his failure to realize that the self is "a disturbingly rich
synthesis," and that "diversity and contradition" are the "essence of
the universe" (193, 195). This one-sidedness culminates in the final

image of Pym's disappearance into whiteness, a denial of negation.

3

Faculty Psychology: Poe as Analyst

Allen Tate opened a line of psychological criticism radically
different from the psychoanalytic. In two influential essays in the
early nineteen-fifties, "Our Cousin Mr. Poe" and "The Angelic
Imagination, " he sketched out an overarching theory including both
psychological and metaphysical implications that are derived from Poe's
stories and from putative metaphysical statements within some of these
and Poe's rather obscure cosmogony m (1848). Encamining Poe's
treatment of abnormal psychology within the context of nineteenth-
century tools and perspectives that were available to Poe, Tate

finds them a good deal "richer in philosophical implication

120

than his psychoanalytic critics have been prepared to see" (Carlson
239). Tate's own inquiry led him to the conclusion that "Poe's symbols
refer to aknown tradition of thought, an intelligible order, apart from
what he was as a man." That intelligible order is the framework of the
faculty psychology, consisting of will, intellect and feeling, which Poe
took for granted.

To Tate, annihilation and disintegration are the themes of Poe's
work, an idea anticipated by D. H. Lawrence in 1923 and William Carlos
Williams two years later. These are the explicit subjects of Luge}; and
the dialogues, which Tate analyzes in "The Angelic Imagination," and
they form the metaphysical counterpart to the f acultat ive psychology of
the stories. Physical annihilation precedes spiritual fulfillment, or a
return to the "unparticled unity" by which Poe defined God. As Poe
himself sums up _Eurikg, "In the original unity of the first thing lies
the secondary cause of all things, with the germ of their inevitable
annihilation" (Carlson Rmition 252). Creation itself, the atomic
universe, is "in a state of radical disequilibrium, every atom striving
to disengage itself from material forms and to return to the original
center" (252). In the end, every individual, along with creation
itself, "by a reverse motion of the atams, will contract, as into its
annihilation. God destroys himself in the eventual recovery of his
unity" (252). Apocalyptic annihilation, then, is simply a larger frame
of reference of the personal disintegration of the individual.

Individual annihilation, whether cauplete mental disintegration, as
of Roderick Usher, or in (apparent) physical death, such as the abyssal
plunges of Pym and Poe's other sailors, is the fulfillment of a process

that begins with a disharmonious relation among the 'faculties.‘ The

121

"strange fire" in the luminous eyes of Usher, for instance, betokens an
intellect that has hypertrophied at the expense of feeling, and augurs
his mental deracination.

Though he draws far different conclusions, Tate owes something of
his psychological analysis to two largely disparaging essays. T. S.
Eliot ("From Poe to Valery"), while acknowledging the importance of Poe
as an influence in the modern world, disqualifies his writing precisely
because it reflects imbalances he perceived in Poe's own mental
attributes. As Eliot puts it, "what is lacking is not brain power, but
that maturity of intellect which comes only with the maturing of the man
as a whole, the development and coordination of his various emotions"
(Carlson Rmition 213). Tate responds more favorably to D. H.
Lawrence (Classic Studies in American Literature), who in T‘ate's eyes
correctly observed that Poe records the disintegration of the mind, but
incorrectly suggests that Poe offers no formation of a new consciousness
in its place.

Tate says little about gm, noting only that its style in certain
passages attains the "lucidity" of Jonathan Swift (Carlson Recogpition
241). To see how Tate's analysis of Poe might apply to m, we turn to
essays for which he seems to be a primary influence. Buried deep within
a style more obfuscatory and inflated than lucid, one can find an
insightful reading in Joseph DeFalco's "DEtaphor and Meaning in Poe's
Narrative of Arthur Gordon M" (1976), built upon the foundation Tate
has laid.

According to DeFalco, Poe uses the traditional ship-as-soul
metaphor in his own way, to depict a psychological abnormality.

Specifically, the succession of diSmasted and otherwise defective

12?.

vessels, and associative nautical procedures such as 'lying to' and
stowage, represent.a.mdnd that has been deracinated by a "diseased" or
"corrupted" imagination. The disease is of course Pym's, not Poe's, and
explained in nineteenth—century terms with the view that Poe himself, as
"supreme fictionist," has created and engineered this psyChological
study. Pym is the product of a defective education, "repressive
Nantucket life," and excessive familial pressure for success. unable to
cope, he becomes a "melandholic," a type of Werther, willfully
prophesying and yearning for suffering. Gradually in the course of his
journey he gives himself over to progressively more fabulous
events--"lurid imaginings" of his own creation--that overwhelm his
intellect and, in numerous instances, his tenuous sanity (30).

DeFalco sees Poe's elaborate frame as a way of conspicuously
distinguishing Poe ("Hr. Poe") from the narrator Pym, signalling by "Mr.
Poe's" own misgivings that we must not totally buy into Pym's
self-deluding "rationalizations" and documentations that feed on his
imaginative creations. Though DeFalco promises in his introduction that
the final image, the Shrouded figure, would "organize the entire
narrative," in resolving Pym's destiny, his interpretation of it finally
is confused and all but skips over it. But it does draw something from
Tate's notion of total disintegration as a precondition for reclaimed
unity. In falling into the embraces of Peters (over the cliff) and the
shrouded figure (into the chasm), Pym has given himself over to total
deracination: he has cleared away the "lumber" of "all the mental
faculties that constitute a self in the real world," and is prepared for
renewal and "reconciliation with spirit" (61, 67).

JOSeph Mbldenhauer offers an alternative reading that seems

123

indebted both to Freud, in his detection of the death instinct, and to
Tate, in his analysis of Pym's corrupted imagination. His study is more
closely aligned to Tate's than Bonaparte's in its greater accountability
to the text as an imaginative product, its treatment of aesthetic
values, its refusal to infer conclusions about Poe's psyche, and its
exploration of the psychological and philosophical implications within
Poe's contemporary framework. In "Imagination and Perversity in T_h_e
Narrative of Arthur: Gordon 3m" (1972) , he looks at both the narrative
Pym 'writes' and the events he 'experiences' as products of Pym's own
extraordinary imagination. Recognizing what Bonaparte missed, a
fictional artist and artwork (Pym and "his" narrative) operating within
Poe's book, Moldenhauer is able to‘ analyze the artistic process as Poe
conceived it in m.

For Moldenhauer, the narrative highlights its own origin’ as the
product of a dreaming and hallucinating mind-in the extravagant imagery
of death and catastrophe, in the absurd , fanciful , and
grotesque objects, such as the racially-mixed, animal-like Peters, and
in the instancing of actual hallucinations and nightmares within the
narrative. Moldenhauer establishes the "theatricality" of Pym's
personality: "All the major episodes of the Narrative are initiated in
the hero's mind; Pym first fancies or 21.223.13.92 his exploits, then lives
than" (273) .

What is of most interest in Moldenhauer's reading is the perversity
of that imagination (signalled by Pym's anagram name, associating him
with the "imp" of the perverse); In the cyclic pattern of all the
near-death and rescue episodes, the imagination of Pym as voyager

(as well as narrator) creates the events that lead him to the brink of

124

death, up to the point where he gives himself over to, or even welcomes
its embrace. It is a repetitive, instinctual movement toward death
itself, "the condition of perfect unity... the enduring union of self
and all in death" (278-9).

A number of readers have noticed that the impulse that Poe
identified and defined as the "imp of the perverse," in his 1845 tale of
that title and elsewhere, resembles Freud's concept of the death
instinct, which he regarded as among the most fundamental drives.
Instincts themselves are a tendency within "organic matter impelling it
towards the reinstatement of an earlier condition. . . the manifestation
of inertia in organic life" (W 158). The death instinct, then,
is a longing for the inert, inanimate, undifferentiated state prior to
the ago. Its task, says Freud, is "to lead organic matter back into the
inorganic state" (224).

But the resemblance to Moldenhauer ' s perception of Pym' s perversity
is more superficial than 'it may seem, for Pym's desires and his
imaginative capacities, while in one sense regressive, are not limited
to a state of inertia or inorganicity. He envisions transcendent union
with the divine, even as he approaches annihilation, a "convergence of
poetic vision and the mind of God, whether in the artist's perceptions
of supernal beauty or in the enduring union of self and all in death"
(279). In M Poe described this on the universal level as the
primordial and post-apocalyptic states of absolute unity; in m
annihilation is individual, and imaged in his "grateful" plunge into the
"embraces" of the chasm at the pole.

Pym's imagination, then, as manifest in both his life and his

narrative, is in one sense the medium through which he conducts his

125

quest: at the same time that quest is necessarily nihilistic:
"irrational, amoral, and self-destructive" (2‘79). Moldenhauer rejects a
reductive. form of psychoanalysis, and judiciously follows Tate's lead in
working within Poe's intellectual context, and specifically, reading Eyp
(as Tate read other Poe works) intertextually with his speculative

literature.

4

Psychology and Formal Analysis: Poe as Allegorist

New Critical Appropriations of ngchoanalysis
Bonaparte's greatest contribution, and through her Freud's, to M

criticism has been particular rather than cemprehensive, and
incorporated into a variety of hermneutics. Those articles that
adhered to a strictly Freudian readingnwhether sharing Bonaparte's
particular emphases or not--were not as numerous, influential , or
comprehensive, leaving Bonaparte's as the standard. 01 the other hand,
psychoanalytic principles in their broad outline become a foundation, or
a point of departure for other readings, particularly New Critical
textual analyses. Of these, the most visible have been readings of Poe
and M as allegories of mental or psychic processes.

Patrick Quinn set the pattern for building a New Critical reading
upon psychoanalytic principles. His The French Face of Poe (1952), is a
landmark study in Poe critici- as a whole, helping to implant Poe
within the ninstream of American literature by showing in canprehensive

detail the extensive appreciation he enjoyed in France and the influence

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he has exerted on Baudelaire, the symbolist poets, and other French
writers.6 In the process he fertilized the field of Poe studies in
America with an array of French insights, the most prevalent of which
were related to psychoanalysis.

For 2113 he offered the first elaborate, sophisticated literary
appreciation by an American. His aim, and stated thesis, was to
introduce 21p to the American academy, as the profound, ingenious,
well-crafted work which he took it to be—-even, as he put it, "the one
central and focusing story in the entirety of Poe's work" (193). For
its introductory purpose, his study is encyclopedic and suggestive
rather than penetrating, with the exception of an insightful,
well-developed argument that M was probably a major influence on
Moby-Dick.

Quinn's orientation toward Tim is subtly and ambivalently organized
by two French sources: Gaston Bachelard was the first to suggest that
the narrative approximates and signifies a dream. In a brief critical
statement in L'eau et les réves (1942) , he observed that beneath the
adventure story, the narrative is "the full achievement of a remarkably
unified dream": that as "an adventure of the unconscious.. . [m] is
among the great works of Edgar Poe" and "among the great books of the
human heart" (qtd. in Quinn 192, 291.).

More significant, and camplex, is Bonaparte's influence. m the
first reading, it seems entirely positive. He agrees that "there exists
an undercurrent of latent meaning" and "potent dream symbolism at work"
in a narrative he calls a "profoundly oneiric drama" (1.88-89, 7.00).
More to the point, of the several themes he reads in 5731, most seem

loosely derived fram Bonaparte's analysis. For example, Quinn defines

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Pym's "perverseness," manifest in his self-destructive behaviors and
longings, as "the intense death-wish," one of the fundamental
"psychological dynamics" of the story (194) . Also, the Doppelganger
motif, the "bifurcation of the hero" into Pym and Augustus and then Pym
and Peters, is defined not only as a dramatic device, but as a
fundamental dynamic that "derives its vitality from the deepest levels
of Poe's mind" (197).

However, we also detect in Quinn a desire to distance himself from
an overtly psychoanalytic stance. Perhaps this is because the
introductory functions of his essay preclude much penetrating analysis
at all. But throughout we find words that hedge, equivocate and
qualify. For instance, acknowledging that his readers will find same of
her ideas "extravagant and grotesque, " he adds that "after one has
edited away the results of her overly ambitious effort at a
microscopically diagrammatic proof of her hypothesis, there ruins a
great deal that is indisputable interest and cogency" (184). Similarly,
referring to the cannibal sacrifice of Parker (who was the chief
mutineer's son), he notes that her reading in terms of the father/son
rivalry "requires not special Freudian acumen but only a sensitive
response to the literary text, which. . . is in evidence throughout the
study of Marie Bonaparte" (185-86). These and similar statelents, along
with his avoidance of the technical language of psychoanalysis, even
while he is introducing its concepts, make it seem as though he were
walking a line between, on one hand, a psychoanalytic approach he finds
appealing, and on the other, expectations of an audience unfavorable to
those concepts. Thus he tries subtly to separate her method from the

insights it has enabled, in order to make the latter more acceptable.

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We will see something like this pattern in many subsequent American M
critics who offer formalist readings with an inconspicuous psychological
component--a necessity in a New Critical academic climate which
discouraged reading the author into his or her work in almost any
respect.

"The Troubled Sleep of Arthur Gordon Pym" (1960) , another early and
respected study, follows the same pattern. Building upon suggestions in
Bonaparte, Quinn, and especially Bachelard, Walter Bezanson develops a
camparison of the Narrative to dream and dream recital.

7He

He calls his own study a complement to Bonaparte's.
explicitly accepts her explanation that Pym's journey is a "search for
the mother, " but these "latent dynamics" provide only a backdrop in his
own analysis of technique. Enlightening though he finds it, "clinical
analysis is a literary irrelevance to the extent that it takes us back
to Poe's childhood and away from M" (172). His own emphasis is upon
dreams--primarily as a source for Poe's technique and object of his
representation, and secondarily as "manifest form" of the psyche. The
considerable power of mg is in the literary evocation of "dream forms,"
including the effects of various kinds of dreams, "fancies" and "psychal
impressions" of near sleep (159). He calls to mind here Henry James,
who criticized plot and character in m, but ae‘mowledged the deep
impression the dreamlike final scene made upon him (Ar; 256; The Golden
Egg; 256-257). Provocatively, Bezanson suggests that the narrative
itself represents "a psychological projection fran the mind of a
troubled sleeper who wakes and then drops back into the self '8 midnight"

(173) . Both meaning and structural logic are grounded not in the

"strained artifices of the plot," but upon disconnected episodes that

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culminate in "sudden tableaux or dream pictures, marked by visual
intensity and highly charged with emotion" (153). This structure is a
rhythmic return to the "dreamworld" of the primary episodes, involving
themes, or dreams, of, for instance, burial and rebirth, in the hold of
the Grmus, deprivation carried to the point of cannibalism, on the
floating wreck, "grossly primitive" race hatred on Tsalal, and the final
journey into the unknown. The climax represents final surrender to the

dreamworld .

Psycholggical Allegog
In Poe: A Cr_iticalf Study (1957), Edward Davidson first developed

the idea that Poe wrote allegories. Despite the fact that Poe decried
this form as the worst example of the "heresy of the didactic, " and
disdained it as unimaginative, predictable fare of popular magazines, he
himself, Davidson argues, wrote relatively pure, didactic allegories.
But they were hardly conventional in theological outlook.

To see Poe's stories as psychological allegories, we must look
beyond the narrower conventional definitional requirements of allegory
as a closed system of images, and explicit indication within the work of
the abstractions represented. We certainly mmzst look beyond the
theological orthodoxy entailed in the allegory proper. Davidson makes a
category of nineteenth-century "allegorists" such as Melville,

Hawthorne , Poe and Dickinson, who because they were not orthodox
believers could "investigate and dramatize religious themes with a
clarity which, to same extent, is denied the believer" (183). The
looser formal criteria here are probably more appropriate to the verb

form "allegorize" than the noun, suggesting the prerogative of dropping

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and piCking up the method within the same work. Drawing from musical

categories, NOrthrop Frye called this the freistimmdge style, in which
the structure can be broken, yet remain present. Beneath its
conventions, allegory ultimately is "thematically interested imagery,"
as Frye puts it, :tended sufficiently to become the "controlling
influence" of the work (Frye 89; Helman 11).

Davidson develops Poe's "allegorical tales" as little dramas that
work out any of several basic themes, for instance, the simple moral
equation that the hero wants to do evil, and then wants to receive
punishment. Besides the perversity of the hero, what sets these tales
apart is that, despite the appearance of a great orderly moral
superstructure, the hero finds himself terrifyingly alone, like the "Man
of the Crowd," an "outcast of the universe" (186). ‘Most importantly,
those which he calls the "psychic dramas" become Poe's investigation of
the inner self, in a method "entirely pictoral, as if the material world
could assume a psychic dimension" (196). In this respect, the material
world--the narrators' dwellings or doubles, for instance-represent
projections of interior elements, dramatizing a psychic process, usually
the disintegration of the self.

Ridhard Wilbur todk up the idea of Poe as psydhological allegorist
in "The House of Poe" (1.959). Noting flat the meanings of an artist "so
devoted to concealment and deception and'unraveling" will be found
"below the surface as a dark undercurrent" (99), he Observes, that these
meanings are always primarily intrapsychic processes. As he puts it,
the stories "occur within the mind of the poet; and its characters are
not independent personalities, but allegorical figures representing the

warring principles of the poet's divided nature" (original emphasis) (117).

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leslie Fiedler also develops a model of pschological allegory in
his reading of Poe, and he applies it to m. He has interlaced
Freudian and Jungian materials throughout his literary history, Love and
Death in the American Novel (1960). In it, he contends that the
decisive factors in American culture have been sexual repression and
sublimation of eros in violence, a process he traces to the Puritan and
evangelical heritage, and "to the unique situati.on.in which
Americans found themselves relative to the wilderness and the Indians.
Because of the wider social and historical dimensions of his thesis, his
camentary on Em will be examined in chapter five. So too will
Davidson's and Wilbur's, for neither man applies his respective model of
psychological allegory to m, which they read as a visionary doc1ment
with deeper links to M, for instance, than the short stories.

(he critic of Poe who tries to link 2m with the stories as
psychological allegories is Daniel Hoffman. His 1978 book, whose title
repeats Poe's name seven times to signify the varied personae Poe
presents (for instance, "Hoaxiepoe"), is perhaps as widely known as any
book on the subject, possibly because it is accessible to a high
school-level reader, and is not cluttered with documentation. It is
somewhat scattershot in its approach and influences , and perhaps
understandably quirky, fram an author who is primarily a poet rather
than scholar. (Indeed, like Tate in "Our Cousin Mr. Poe," he opens his
study with a discussion of the rich subjective effect Poe has had on him
from adolescence, and implies a personal kinship, as a fellow poet.)
While certain readings are almost identical to Bonaparte's,8
(wham he mentions only to disclaim), and his thesis has a generally

Freudian orientation, he has followed Tate's and Wilbur's lead in

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focusing upon the texts rather than Poe's mind as the object of
analysis. From a superior position as a master of his materials in
their effect on his readers, Poe "speaks to us not as a psychotic but a
man," one who "lived with his unconscious pulsations close to the
surface of his skin," and was uniquely able to "summon" than (322).

He sees the stories in general as various allegories of one basic
abnormal psychic process: the overthrow of reason by irrational forces
within the psyche. P_oe_; is highly uneven in the quality of its
discussions, but in his best analyses, such as that of "The Fall of the
House of Usher," Hoffman decodes a symbolic language whose terms appear
in numerous stories (it would be more accurate to say he applies codes
worked out in parts by Tate, Davidson and Wilbur): the sealed, organic
house, or the weirdly lighted, circular chamber as a metaphor for the
psyche: the letter as a "summons" from the unconscious: doubles in the
form of friends, relations, spouses as allegorical figures of his
fragmented psyche, roughly in accord with T‘ate's tripartite
configuration. The hero's relationship to these figures generally
involves murder and burial, or union, often incestuousnboth misguided
attempts at psychic adjustment. The former, an act of repression, leads
to self-destroying irruption, such as confession or vengeance; the
latter is another form of murder by possession and objectification, as
in the cases of badeline and Eleonora. Ultimately both murder and
incest are self-murder.

cm gm itself Hoffman is ambivalent, and his essay is a confused
agglomeration of literal, psychoanalytic, sociological, archetypal, and
apocalyptic elements that translate into an uncertainty about what Poe

is doing in m. The black cmnunity on Tsalal, for instance, is said

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variously to represent Poe's fear of a slave revolt in the American
South (270): his fear of "atavistic impulses" within himself (271); and
. his "imaginative regression" to death, as the white region of the pole
was to rebirth (271-272)--none of which is original with Hoffman, except
in their combination. He attempts to distance himself from Bonaparte's
reading, which viewed the work as "a sprawling mass of compulsive
repetitions," yet acknowledges that Poe is not "in full control," and
suggests that "the struggle to master the uncontrollable is the very
theme of Pym's Narrative" (266).

In fact, if anything orients his reading it is Bonaparte's
interpretation, onto which he grafts so many other ideas. Distilled of
the extraneous, the outline of his reading is as follows: Pym is seen
as a passive individual intellectually limited to a narrow form of
rationalism, and driven by unconscious campulsions:

Pym's destiny is of course seated in his unconscious, whence
it rises again and again to daminate, in terror and in
ecstasy, his feckless life of choices.... This power that
surges with uncontrollable energy and directs body and mind
toward ends it will not articulate.. . we acknowledge as the id
whose behests cannot be transcended or escaped. In M, the
narrator is as helpless in its grasp as are his vessels in the
tidal currents of the sea (7.68).
One aspect of these unconscious forces takes the form of Pym' s perverse
destructive impulse and craving for suffering, which Hoffman describes
in terms Freud used for the death instinct--"the longing for the living
body to die, of the organic to become inorganic" (273). The ending

itself Hoffman sees as infantile regression toward two "opposite yet

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complementary conditions," the state of death represented by the island,
"the frightening ecstasy of [the individual's] reintegration into the
unity fram which it has been exiled," and the state of rebirth,
represented by the maternal shrouded figure, the milky south sea, and
the chasm, by which he enters the "womb of the world itself, from which
he was born, and is reborn" (273, 277).

Leonard Engel, in "Edgar Allan Poe's Use of the Enclosure Device in
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" (1978), provides a modified
intiation reading that is grounded in a conflation of Freudian and
Jungian theory. Like the others, he argues for the structural integrity
of 2m based upon the pattern of the repeated motif of enclosure. Much
of the essay is the enumeration of instances, allusions, and metaphoric
verbs of enclosure, f luxuating between apparently threatening tumb- or
prisonlike enclosures and protective wanblike refuges. He sees this
image not only as a reification of a mental state (undeveloped,
dependent), but as an aesthetic device independent of latent content.
There are five principal instances around which the narrative is
organized, in the rhythms of enclosure/death and emergence/ rebirth.

Unlike most other readers, who see Pym became more lethargic,
passive, and uncanprehending with each stage, Engel sees Pym emerge from
each wanblike enclosure with a more sophisticated perspective and a more
developed identity. While the enclosures certainly are a metaphor for
the womb, he suggests that they are even more directly a reification of
an inner state, and that by drawing in upon himself Pym is able to
access his own unconscious resources of creativity, energy, and
strength. For example, in contrast to the childlike, passive Pym of the

Ariel and Mug episodes, on the Jane g1 he has developed authority

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to become a controlling influence on the captain; and Engel notes that
it is Pym that saves Peters from burial, and makes the key decisions
that save their lives while hiding out on the island.

In "Dirk Peters: A New look at M" (1.969), Peter Sheehan briefly
develops an allegorical model based on the bifuraction of the psyche
into imagination and reason. The pattern of Peters' repeated rescues of
Pym from disastrous situations, which Pym's own extravagant imagination
has created, is a metaphor for the tempering influence of reason on
imagination. As the two characters grow closer, they reflect a process

of integration of the mind into a balanced whole.

5

Jungian Archetypal Models: Poe as Hythmaker

Several of the important studies I have called psychological
allegories involve a conflation of Jungian and Freudian ideas. Of these
the Jungian part tends to be deemphasized in the studies themselves, and
therefore in my own discussion. This should not be surprising, since
Jungian archetypal criticism was founded upon elemental Freudian
principles--for instance the bifurcation of the psyche, and the concepts
of repression, projection, and complex, which receive only a different
coloration in Jung's use. Thus Freudians speak of a process of psychic
adjustment and psychic integration not profoundly different fran Jung's
individuation.

This is not to say there are not significant differences,

especially in the concept of libido, the origin of religious experience,

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and the philosophical outlook. But the differences in the morphology of
the psyche and the origin of instinct do not play out in profound
differences in the psychic dynamics of the individual. One supposes
this is part of the reason we often see literary studies of Poe and
others that conflate concepts from both systems without necessary
incoherence, and even theoretical studies, such as Erich Neumann's
Origin and History of the Unconsgigis, that definitively cannot be
assigned to one school or the other.

There is a species of myth criticism in America rooted in Jung
which was highly popular in the sixties and seventies. However its work
on Poe has not been very fruitful. Those which might be classed as myth
studies of MI responding to not-very—subtle nudges offered by Poe,
focus upon the apocalyptic strain of certain portions, and typical
features of the narrative, such as cannibalism, the hero's journey,
confrontations with monsters, subterranean adventures, and potential
initiation. In the actual studies of gym these most often take the form
of undeveloped suggestions; as a potential approach to 3m, they take
the form of unfulfilled promise. me wonders if this is related to the
fact that Pym does not act like a hero-initiate, remaining physically
rather passive and spiritually vacuous and static. Unlike Freudian
criticism, Jungian criticism tends not to interpret examples of
failed integration or initiation. Their putative transpersonal,
mythic value predispose these heroes to success , and their journeys
are inherently structured upon movement toward wholeness and
completion.

Those studies which argue for a second level of meaning in m that

is cosmic and metaphysical rather than psychic-what has been variously

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called visionary, transcendental, or apocalyptic readings, and have
often linked 3m with Mgr-no doubt owe something to Jungian myth
study, but will be more appropriately discussed in chapter five, which
examines readings linking Eym_to romanticism, Here we will close the
Chapter by looking at those Jungian archetypal studies, slight in number
and quality, whidh are psyChologically rooted.

Only one merits much attention, for its superior sophistication,
its unique, even exciting, thesis, and the light it sheds upon anomalous
features of the narrative. In "The Dragon and the‘Uroborus: Themes of
Metamorphosis in Agthur Gordon Pym" (1978), Barton Levi St. Armand
continues work he‘has done on the uses Poe made of occult symbolism.in
structuring his fiction. Taking the umbilical, uterine, and womb
imagery more literally than others, he argues that m is an allegory of
the "the initial stage of consciousness struggling to free itself from
the slumber of 'unconscious development. '" Pym's world is not
infantile, but embryonic, and he emerges a "still-undeveloped germ of
ego consciousness" (66) . In addition to the metaphoric structure of the
sea voyage, he uses alohemical symbols of metamorphosis to play out his
"fetal drama." He notices the large numbers of reversals of fortune,
transformations of Character, and horrifying events that resemble so
many stages of the classical alchemical transmutations: mortification,
sublimation, separation, purgation, putrefaction, fermentation, and
conjunction, to name a few.

The two daminant symbols that permeate the Narrative are
permutations of the ancient symbols of the uroboros and the
dragon--symbols alchemy appropriated as opposite values. The urdborus,

traditionally depicted as a snake swallowing its own tail, symbolizes

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self-sufficiency, totality, eternity, and the reconciliation of
opposites--male and female, it is at once impregnating and giving birth
to itself. m draws attention to certain of these features in the
biche de mer, a round mollusk with only two opposite organs: "absorbing,
and. .. excretog" (20.4), and the Gallapogos tortoise, focusing on
its snake-like head and neck, its round shape, and its self-sufficient
capacity to store water and to endure without food for "up to two years"
(12.17) .

If the uroboros suggests completion, the dragon-—grotesque,
assymetrical, hybrid-~represents malformation or "arrested development."
gym is heavily populated by creatures and humans with these attributes,
and St. Armand points out that these are also the features of Pym's
narrative. Pym's own consciousness has abnormal qualities. For
instance, in addition to his perverse longings and behavior, he not only
lacks perceptual growth, but seems to lose his ability to comprehend and
articulate, until language fails him altogether.

The dragon is also a symbol of transformation, for good or ill, and
the animals, people, and situations are always changing their aspect.

An unnatural conjunction, such as the hybrid, can produce a greater,
sinister monstrosity, for instance the "hermaphrodite brig" appearing as
a savior becanes the horrifying death ship of corpses. But the
transformation generally has the beneficent result of a reconciliation
of opposites, a uroboric whole that propels Pym's own development and
metamorphosis. Thus the §_ra_mpu_§, whose name can refer to the killer
whale or the sailor's friend, the dolphin, ultimately supplies food and
drink that save them; the "fiendish," bestial halfbreed Peters

ultimately becomes Pym's savior; and, in a process resembling the

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alchemical reaction known as putrefactio, the decay and morbidity on the
Gr_a_ngus becomes a process of purification and ultimately the salvation
of Pym and his helper.

For Pym, as a germinal ego, the uroboros is "linked to the mother,
and the rondure of the fetal womb" (65). According to Neumann, "The
uroboros of the maternal world is life and psyche in one; it gives
nourishment and pleasure, protects and warms, comforts and forgives"
(qtd. in St. Armand 68). Jung's and Neumann's discussion of maternal
uroboric incest, when the ego is still germinal, is a salubrious,
necessary process (as opposed to the deadly, prdhibited incest of
infancy). Thus the climactic transformation emerges out of the
conjunction of black and white, clarified in south seas as Tsalal and
the white animals, in a projective alchemical reaction suggested by the
luminosity, the aurora, the "ashy shower," and the "coruscation of all
colors and a conjunction of elemental substances into one" (65). The
great white figure is the uroboric mother, and Pym's submergence into
the chasm's embrace is "uroboric incest" which will provide resources of
strength and creativity which will fuel his own transfonmation, as he
goes on-perhaps in the missing chapters, St. Armand speculates-~to
"transcend the matriarchal world... for the active challenges of the
Hero Myt " (69) .

Ridhard Levine, in "The Downward Journey of Purgation: thes on an
Imagistic Leitmotif in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Eng" (1969),
organizes the novel on the basis of "above" and "below" imagery in the
world through which Pym journeys as metaphor for the
conscious/unconscious and rational/irrational dichotomy of his mind.

The shoreline, deck, the earth's surface, and the equator itself are all

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lines dividing the world of order and light from chaos. Below each line
Pym encounters dangers that produce irrational states of mind. Pym
journeys downward and outward into danger, away from reason, home, and
safety in a quest motivated by irrational desires for "discovery" and
the "possibility" of life in a "more spiritual sphere" (29). What he
discovers is his capacity for overcoming obstacles, making his voyage
"the purgative journey of men: from shadow to light to salvation" (31).

In his essay "Poe, 2m, and Initiation" (1970), David La Guardia
offers a confused interpretation reflecting misunderstanding of basic
facts about the plot and virtually a reversal of his thesis midway
through. Early on we learn that Pym fails to reach the state of
"maturity and wisdom experienced by other famous initiates, " yet later
we are told that the Narrative is "Poe's masterwork in the evolving
consciousness of a fully developed man" (82). Kathleen Sands' "The
Mythic Initiation of Arthur Gordon Pym" (1974) is a more readable
treatment of the same theme. Drawing from Joseph Henderson and Joseph
Campbell, she distinguishes two kinds of initiation rituals, or "inner
journeys. . .of mental and spiritual growt ": initiation into manhood and
into the priesthood as "shaman or seer," which, if survived, "gives him
insight into the inscrutable and power over the non-elect" (14).

She puts Moffitt Cecil's two-narrative theory of M's structure to
her own use, to argue not for the work's disunity, as Cecil does, but
for its unity based upon a doubling of the initiation motif (See ch. 4
below). In the "first" narrative--the gig; and ms episodes—Pym
undergoes initiation into manhood. She finds examples or parallels of
the various typical rites in these chapters, including undergoing

physical, mental, and spiritual testing, confronting a labyrinth,

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adopting a guide, learning moral lessons, and killing someone. In the
"second" narrative he undergoes the Shamanic ritual, which involves a
repetition of the first at a higher and more perilous pitch "in order to
penetrate and come to an understanding of the oneness of the Universe"
(14). Pym's disappearance into the polar mists represents "the ascent
to heaven to obtain the consecration of the gods" (16), while the
reticence of the Narrative regarding subsequent events and the "lost
chapters" is explained in terms of the ritual: the reader can only
"speculate on the degree of godlike wisdom Pym has gained. . . [because]
the reader (who is not one of the chosen) is excluded from the ultimate
experience with the gods" (16).

Grace Farrell Lee's "The Quest of Arthur Gordon Pym" (1972) begins
by acknowledging the biographical and formalist evidence that 32111 was
composed hastily under pressure, but asserts that such evidence "does
not preclude the existence of a structural principle underlying the
successive stages of the story," or that Poe was exploring "in fictive
form a phenomenon fundamental to his human experience" (23). She
concentrates upon m as a narrative of the initiatory descent into
hell, imaged in "pagan" and Christian mythology--an archetypal
representation of the encounter of the ego wi th the unconscious ,
followed by transformation and rebirth. As such, m is not an
imitation of mythological discourse, but an actual myth narrative,
indicated by its attempt to "search for same 'deep axis of reality'"
(24). The shape gm gives to this archetype is the familiar sea voyage,
and the imagery of darkness, suffering, and primitivism of the island of
Tsalal as hell itself.9 Thus the death imagery that pervades the

narrative, including the numerous actual deaths, Pym's near-deaths, and

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the "ship of death" the four su. 'ivors of the Grampus encounter, are
given a context in this journey to the land of the dead.

To this she adds complementary symbols discussed by anthropologist
Mircea Eliade related to initiatory ordeals in primitive mythology
involving regression to the womb: "a hero being swallowed by a sea
monster and emerging victorious after breaking through the monster's
belly.. .. [and] descent into a cave or crevice assimilated to the mouth
or the uterus of Mother Earth" (qtd. in Lee 25). Both she finds
relevant to Pym's ordeal, specifically in the Grampus hold episode, and
in the cavern and chasms of Tsalal (and indeed, while it is not
necessary for her logic, a grampus is an old term for a small whale.)

Interestingly, her reading values the adventures on Tsalal as more
significant overall than the submergence into the chasm at the pole.
The former is the climax: the latter is merely the "baptism" in
whiteness that "redeem " him back to the land of the living (as earlier
submergence and burial scenes betokened baptism into hell.)

As a methodology, there are problu with these readings that
perhaps go beyond other kinds of structuralist readings. looking at
Lee's essay as typical, we can see that evidence adduced for the meaning
assigned to selected images in M is of two interlocking types:
literary precedent, and an 'explanatory' phrase of great import.

Literary precedent in biblical and classical materials seems to
lend by its very presence substance to both 5m and the essay, even
before a reason for its presence its offered. An extreme example will
reveal how much is ventured from the slightest of connections. Notice
that her interpretation of Pym's final plunge, mentioned above, is based

solely upon the presence of whiteness in both Own and a preceding text:

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The Gospel of Nicodemus, which relates the descent [of Christ
into Hell], concludes as two brethren ascend from the
underworld, are baptized ,‘ and clothed in white robes,
'transfigured, exceedingly white, and were no more seen.‘
Therefore, the ending [of ._Pyr_n]. .. provides a conclusion to the
mythic-Biblical framework of death and descent to the
underworld; and the whole provides a structure from which Poe
may descend into the unconscious (31. ) .

Clearly the descent-into-hell archetype represented by Pym' s
journey is itself a metaphor for something else--a psychic or
enlightenment process. These meanings are signalled by phrases of great
import: "descent into the unconscious," "reached the foundation of
reality," and return "to primal origins" (Lee 30, 31). They too lend
weightiness to m, but they do not explain. When we have read the last
word of the essay, no profound meaning, psychological , metaphysical or
aesthetic, has been unearthed. All they really accomplish is to invoke
indirectly another body of discourse, the theoretical literature of Jung
and Eliade, for instance. Yet the structure and sources of Jung's own
work tend to consist of a seemingly endless multiplication of
imaginative and literary sources such as those lee has cited; as with
Eliade's ethnographic literature. Without even touching the issue of
the existence of the individual- or collective unconscious as the
theorists have conceived them, this hall of mirrors calls into question
the reliability of her representation.

The only fact Lee might establish is the presence of repetition in
m of preceding images and patterns, linking it with a literary

tradition, rather than a psychological or metaphysical reality. Studies

144

we examine in the next chapter will contain examples of the archetype
rescued from psychological criticism by Northrop Frye, who appropriated
the concept as a repetition grounded in literary discourse, not

metaphysics or the morphology of the psyche.

Notes
1These are surveyed and discussed in Young.

2See for instance Edmund Wilson's 1926 essay "Poe at Home and
Abroad," reprinted in Carlson Recogniti0Q§_142—151, and A. H. Quinn.

3In addition to the key articles by Lacan and Derrida, see
especially Barbara JOhnson's and Shoshana Felman's contributions to the
same volume.

4Which apparently kept him.out of incarceration, she feels. She
states explicitly that had he not been an artist he "might conceivably
have spent part of his life in prison or the madhouse" (209).

5Daniel Hoffman, in 1973, was the first to notice a potential
relationship between Poe's fiction and the uncanny (322).

6Cambiaire preceded him with his 1927 study, however this
inferior study did not make a profound impression.

7Bezansonmakes no reference to Bachelard, whose scattered
comments on gymiwould not be translated until the nineteeneseventies.
Nonetheless, in many ways Bezanson's work seems closer to his.

8For instance, "Berenice," "Lackobreat.," "Lionizing."

9Kaplan anticipates her in the latter interpretation. He notes

that the unique water there Shares several qualities with Styx in
Dante's Inferno, as purple and bloodlike (Kaplan 167).

145

Chapter Four

"I Once Wrote a Very Silly Book": The Problem of Form

Cont ext

During the period dominated by New Criticism in the American
academy, from about the nineteen-forties through the -seventies,jg§;
‘Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym provoked a contradictory response, one
paradoxical in several respects, diverse, interesting, and as
contentious as that of any other period. Certainly it advanced our
understanding of the text. It was the period in which Pym came into its
own: most books on Poe included it; studies of his thought and
philosophical writings were more likely to incorporate it: scholarShip
mowed toward consensus in the circumstances and progress of its
composition, and also established Poe's sources, and the nature and
extent of his borrowing; other studies revealed a surprising breadth of
cosmopolitan influence it in turn has exerted; American psychoanalytic
and Jungian critics did most of their work on it in this period;
literary historians moved Pym about among the campany of Ishmael,
Ieatherstocking, Huckleberry Finn, and a few others: and most
importantly, the field Opened up with.many kinds of formal analysis:
debate about its genre classification, and about internal formal issues

that emerged involving structure, style, symbolism, irony, and narrative

146

147
strategy. This set of issues, those of most concern to the New Critics,
generated the most debate of this period. There have been numerous
close textual analyses, but the formal criticism of M has been
dominated by debate over whether it even qualifies for such analysis on
the basis of stated or implicit New Critical assumptions. This question
draws into the formal debate a great deal of what René Wellek calls
"extrinsic methods," including source, compositional, bibliographic, and
textual materials, and resulted in rather multi-colored, eclectic
studies.

This chapter, then will deal will those studies that sought to mak
sense of Em on the basis of both formal textual analysis, and source
and campositional study. We find in the same study both the intrinsic
procedure of establishing internal relationships among the formal
elements, and the extrinsic one of embedding the text in a larger
contextual frame of genre or biography. What unites then
hermeneutically is their attempt to contain and regulate a seemingly
irrational text by the accumulation of fact, within and/or around it.
That question of qualification was never settled within the framework of
formal criticism, but several general positions were clarified: first,
formal and thematic scrutiny reveals gym to be a work of great merit or
even a masterpiece degite or because of its unique features: second,
formal study, buttressed by campositional and source study, shows that
it is a failure, but one worthy of study for the light it can shed upon
Poe's thought and art: and finally, that it is a failure, hackwork
unworthy of sustained attention.

At the end of the seventies, as other critical currents rapidly

began to reshape EVE criticism, gym remained a minor work and a

148

problematic text in the w of an author whose own credentials
remained questionable in significant quarters throughout much of this
period. Besides Allen Tate's studies, none of the other of the most
influential New Critics had much to say of him. For example, Cleanth
Brooks finds his work adulterated with Transcendentalist mysticism: and
the formative Understanding Poetry, by Brooks and Robert Penn Warren,
dismisses as meretricious both the sensational effects in the fiction
and the intellectual foundation of his criticism. Yvor Winter's
denunciation of Poe's work as vulgar, sentimental, pretentious and
trivial has already been discussed. William K. Wimsatt found his
symbolism to be confused and bogus, and the poetry insubstantial:
"Ethereal vagueness and melancholy , evaporations of languorous and
pallid loveliness wreathe the figure of Poe" (590, 479). Ironically Poe
was the first to pronounce the disrelation between the aims of poetry
and of truth or morality, and to argue for objective analysis. Indeed,
George Snell makes a case for him as a proto-New Critic in every
respect. Nevertheless, they found his poems and stories too contingent
upon the world beyond their frame, pointing outward to society, the
psyche, and philosophy, for instance, for the kind of objective,
autotelic textual analysis same of them were advocating. It is
interesting that the only New Critic interested in Poe, Tate, was
comfortable with the reference of the work beyond itself--specifically
the interaction of Poe's text with his intellectual environment.

Like Poe himself, the New Critics perceived poetic language to be
of a fundamentally different order than all other kinds . Prose was
regarded as referential to the objective world behind it, including the

mind of its author, but poetry cammunicates experience in a unique and

149

individual way. As Cleanth Brooks defined it, the poem "is not a
secondary transcription into words of a prior event--the poem is a
simulacrum of reality.. . by £131 an experience, rather than an
abstraction, representation, or statement about reality" (gm 202). Its
meaning is not conveyed through the medium of language, but inheres
within the language and the unique arrangements of its formations. The
critic's business then, was with the words of the text and the body of
the poem, as a self-contained, self-referential object. Therefore,
boundary and structure are crucial. To try to look through or beyond
them is to "do violence to the internal order of the poem," according to
Brooks (pg; 202). The poem communicates its experience by the internal
dynamics of its eletents as they relate to the whole—dynamics that, in
the successful poem, instance coherence, balanced tension, and symmetry,
even when the experience presented might be described as discordant or
even chaotic. Thus not only is the individual poem itself framed, but
the way in which it is approached, as well. As Welleck points out, "no
coherent body of knowledge can be established unless it defines its
object, which to the New Critic will be the individual work of art
clearly set off from its antecedents in the mind or. .. society" (153).

Considering the reservations many New Critics had about Poe, and
considering New Criticism's origins in and preference for the shorter
poem, it is not surprising to find serious reservations about Poe's
problematic long narrative. As Alfred Kazin explains in "Criticism at
the Poles," New Criticism distanced itself from novels and narrative
literature in general. Like poetry, fiction was properly conceived of
as organic and impersonal , growing "in accordance with some. inner

principle of its own being" (Wimsatt 683). To prevent the intrusion of

150

the author or narrator, it was to be dramatic in presentation. The
novel, arising as it did from narrative literature, was too likely to be
a "creature of the writer's ego, either as an expression of his feelings
as man or an assertion of his opinions" (Wimsatt 683). On the other
hand, the brief poem was more easily perceived as a self-contained
object, and lent itself more readily to close textual analysis. But
even among novels and narrative literature, EVE is conspicuous in this
respect. How could it be treated as self-contained when it is so rich
in ideological and intellectual implication, authentic or not? How can
a case be made for a "special language" when it draws in and points
outward to so much other discourse? (Indeed, besides the unfinished
Journal of Julius Rodman, no Poe text draws more heavily upon other
sources.) Finally, how can it be treated as objective when it delands
so much of the individual reader--to interpret, in the absence of any
interpretive voice within the narrative, to provide continuity and
"connections, " between events and characters, which the master himself,
Henry James, pointed out are missing, and to "finish" a narrative with
enormous blank spaces in the plot?

Nevertheless, other formalist-oriented critics were drawn to the
text precisely because of its experimental, problematic form, and sought
to respond to the challenges it posed. Like New Criticism in general,
they were responding to what they felt were the inadequacies of
socio-historical and psychological forms of criticism, and of
traditional source, textual and biographical scholarship. Such
approaches, they felt, attempt to make criticism a scientific procedure,
but, as R. P. Blackmr put it, obtusely believe _theyare "lakirng an

interpretation by surrounding the work with facts" (qtd. in Welleck

131

147). Cleanth Brooks asserts that "all such 'formulations' lead away,
from the center of the poem, not toward it" (_U_rg 199). Formalist
critics of 3m identified this as a serious problem in the commentary on
that text—~extrinsic "criticism" evades the text, or approaches it ‘
indirectly, buffered by theoretical structures, such as psychoanalysis.
Look through the literature on M, M. L. Rosenthal complains in his
stylistic analysis, and "you'll be hard put to find even one passage
from which the critic quotes. . . at any length and then attempts to
account for its affective dynamics" (31). But what formalist critics
promised, and what a few delivered, was a good faith effort at
confronting the narrative's text itself, and in so doing, its novel and
disturbing features.

To be sure, formalist critics found their own ways of avoiding
address of the text as a whole, or its core: stylistic studies that
look at only a few 'remarkable' passages: elaborate theories of
structure or symmetry from which no significance unfolds: partial or
fragmentary studies that focus on a single image, such as the shrouded
figure, a single character dynamic, like the Pym-Peters relationship, or
a single episode, in effect arbitrarily mining the text for ore that
interests them without comment on the precinct they are mining. Despite
the quantity of studies, relative to other periods, and a handful of
fine scholarly and critical studies, in retrospect we can see that a
large proportion of the discourse of this period, formalist and
otherwise, was unenlightening. As Barbara Johnson has deronstrated how
psychoanalytic critics became enwrapped within the frame of "The
Purloined Letter," essentially writing themselves into the story as

analyst, and so losing their detached vantage, so the text of 3m in a

152
similar process seems.to anticipate and invite elaborate formalist
schemes, only to undermine the stand taken.

A.notable example of the kind of critical traps the text lays is
RiChard Kopley's formal interpretation. Responding to Poe's
'invitation' to decode the text as if it were one of the variety of
ciphers that Pymlencounters, Kopley elaborates an incredibly
intricate literal explanation that seeks to explain the great white
figure, the events beyond the end of the narrative and the work's
essential unity. The argument is a house of cards that is
increasingly made to stand by sheer force, with growing pages of
notations, ever more strenuous explanations, and ever thinner
evidence. By the third essay it has become a weighty "hidden"
plot involving the migration of an ancieit Biblical tribe, the
"Edomites" of North Africa, to Tsala131 the annihilation of the
Tealalians as an allegorical reenactment of the destruction of
Jerusalem: a voyage of the Penguin (the same one that collides with the
Iggig; in.chapter two) to the South Pole, supposedly to fight its own
battle with the Tsalalians along the way, to account for their terror
of white Objects (with a presumably white penguin figurehead): and the
Mia's second collision with Pym at the pole, effecting his rescue
and return to safety.

A product of Kopley's own imagination, this edifice collapses of
its own weight. In the reticence of the would-be interpretive voices
("Mr. Poe," Pym, and the "Note" author,) Kopley is drawn into the
narrative himself, initially as the cryptographer, a type of Legrand,
and later a kind of substitute author/narrator.2 David Ketterer has

called Kopley's contribution "ingenious" and "one of the most

153

important," but not a single interpretation of Hi“. since, including
Ketterer's, has incorporated his conclusions.

In fact no overarching stand has endured. At the end of the period
bracketed in this chapter, no consensus had emerged regarding the
meaning of the elementary features of the narrative, such as: the Ariel
episode, the Tsalalians, the white figure, the pole itself, the variety
in narrative voice and style, and the unknown final events ; and Poe's
overall design, if there is one, remains open. Ridgely, surveying the
recent literature on m in 1978, found fourteen distinct genres for
which it had been claimed, ranging from verisimilar voyage narrative, to
picaresque, to parody, to Bildungsroman, to burlesque, to
"existentialist-absurdist reading," etc. But he found no dominant claim
or trend, and simply concluded with a list of questions critics yet
needed to address. Thus one critic could say in 1984 that gym has
"continually thwarted our efforts" to find the "key," and another in
1987 that M continues to "tease" us, an "impudent and ingenious
fiction," as Pym himself predicts his narrative will be judged
(Sutherland 12, Robert lee 115).

John Barth, invited to the 1987 m conference on Nantucket Island
to give 'a writer's perspective,‘ expressed frustration to the audience
of the leading Pymologists. His paper was, as he said, a record of a
variety of assays he had made upon the text in an attempt to find its
logic. He finds, for instance, rurkably precise correspondence in the
chronology and geometry (e.g. , Pym crosses the Equator into the Southern
Hemisphere at the precise midpoint of the narrative, Poe interpolates
birth- and death dates fram his own life into the narrative, etc.), but

can find no point to all this. As a sailor himself, the nautical

154

materials of the "realistic mode" catch his attention, but upon the
slightest examination they turn out to be incredible and bogus. He
applies the "wandering hero's night-sea journey" and other myth cycles,
but finds that the second part of the narrative does not correspond to
the generic events of the hero's return (16). Pym himself lacks "the
moral-dramatic voltage required of protagonists," and his actions are
"meaningless, dranaturgically speaking" (17-18). Even the metafictive
concerns of the narrative frame are merely a "mirror trick," and he
concludes:

The problem is that Pym, and therefore his narrative, has

no mainspring.... [It is] not a counterfeit but an isdmorph:

not a hoax but a mimicry . Em echoes the Bi ldungsroman and

the Ur-Myth and mines the contours of dramatic action the way

a praying mantis mimes a green twig but is not a green twig

(17-18).

2

The Case Against m

We will turn first to studies that argue for the essential
incoherence of gm, by critics and scholars who regard it as either a
blunder, a hoax, or a product of some other slight intention. This is
the often implicit judgment of many of the scholars who have pieced
together Poe's sources and his composition process. We will then
examine a sample of the models of unity and design that have been

offered, based upon structure, theme, style, and narrative strategy.

155

Cmsition Histog and Form

As we saw in chapter one, the chief biographers held a fairly
simple perspective of Poe's mercenary motive for writing 3m and his
hoaxing or at least less-than-serious artistic intentions for it based
upon documents that are few yet apparently in accord. One, a June, 1836
letter from Harpers Brothers to Poe, explains why they had rejected his
"Folio Club" collection, and suggests Poe tailor his writing for the
market: the tales were "too learned and mystical" for the "generality
of readers," and from their experience it was clear that "Readers in
this country have a decided and strong preference for works (especially
fiction) in which a single and connected story occupies the whole volume
or number of volumes, as the case may be" (rpt. in A. H. Quinn 250-251).

Another piece of documentary evidence detractors always mention is
Poe's only known remark about the work. The content, that Jim is "a
very silly book, " has been consistently mismmderstood because the
context has never been properly qualified. It occurs in a letter to
William Burton, editor of Gentleman's Magg. zine and Poe's employer fran
1839 to 1840 (rpt. in A. H. Quinn 297-300). In it Poe referred to
Burton's 1838 review of 13m (rpt. in Pollin "Contemporary" 39), calling
it "severe" but "essentially correct," though it had skewered m as a
work of "faulty construction and poorness of style," and "a mass of
ignorance and effrontery." But he added, cryptically, "you will find
yourself puzzled in judging me by ordinary motives" (rpt. in A. H. minn
297-300) . What is overlooked is that, like the letter as a whole, these
caments are offered in a tone of appeasement, in an effort at
reconciliation with Burton after a major quarrel; in bringing up the

review, he both validates Burton's critical judgment and assures him

156

that he bears no ill will from it. Poe's apparent dismissal of gym,
therefore, does not by itself justify ours.

Certain of Poe's general statements of criticism.are taken as
evidence that _Pm was not a serious undertaking. The most famous are
his many statements of opposition in principle to long works (e.g.,
works "too long to be read at one sitting" lose the "unity of
impression" [Essays 15]). Others have cited comments Poe made about
works that resemble 2m, in Poe's 1843 review of James Fenimore Cooper's
flyandotté,as adding further weight to the~mercenary as against the
artistic motive: 'Wilderness and sea adventures, while "of intrinsic and
universal interest," belong to an inferior class of fiction, "the
popular and widely-circulated class, read with pleasure but not
admiration," which "a man of genius will rarely, and should never
undertake": moreover, to do so and fail would be "omxclusive evidence of
imbecility" (_Eisgfi 479, 480).

Wch.the authoritative weight of standard biography behind them,
befitt Cecil (1963), and then Jbseph Ridgely and Iola Haverstick (1966)
reacted with strong, authoritative articles against the surge of wanm
appreciation of m by Patrick Quinn, Edward mvidson, Harry Levin,
Sidney Kaplan, and'Walter Bezanson (1952-1960). Both drew upon, and
contributed to, biographical and source scholarShip, to support internal
evidence that m was a hoax as well as a deeply flawed work of art.
Cecil voices surprise at the claims of unity'by one or another recurrent
theme, in the face of obvious incongruities in more concrete formal
properties, such as style and voice. He argues that the numerous minor
discrepancies and errors point to the basic disjunction in the book's

middle that breaks it in two, and this is his focus.3 What he finds

157

is that the ho ‘: Poe has perpetrated was not that of trying to pass P_y_m_
off as fact, but of trying to palm off two separate short narratives as
one long one, with "little effort to fuse the two." The first, a
'realistic' adventure of a stowavay boy and his dog, has a style, point
of view, characterization, and general thrust that is profoundly
different from the second, an "arabesque fantasy" of polar exploration
(Clarke 216, 222).

The two stories evince different aims as well as sources of
inspiration. When Pym speaks of his reasons for stowing away, and his
aspirations for sea travel, they involve a romantic, boyish desire for
"shipwreck, famine, disaster"--events that unfold in the Grgmus story,
but bear little relation to the Jane Guy story, which draw upon the
current interest in Antarctica and geography and cite the published
findings of actual South Seas explorers. Cecil points to the difference
in point of view: the first is highly subjective, consisting of Pym's
reflections upon his sensations, dreams, and suffering; the second is
objective, with almost no introspection, and an unmistakable adult
awareness and authority in his interests and in the decisions that he
makes. The failure to align the 'two' Pyms' characters is but one
example of the carelessness with which Poe apparently spliced the two
stories. Others are that the stowaway story is simply abandoned, and
once Pym boards the Jane Guy all traces of the horrific events are
simply erased fran the Pym's memory and the narrative. Correspondingly,
there is no clear anticipation of the South Seas exploration to care in
the Grmus story—only a few seemingly belated additions, such as in
the Preface.

In a twist that sets Cecil apart, he asserts that taken

158

individually, both stories are remarkably coherent, and oddly suggests
that reading them independently of each other would "pose no
extraordinary problem to the critic" (222). No other critic has
suggested this be done, and if he was serious, one can only wonder how
disentangling the voyages, and the framing texts that Poe has used to
weave them together could so easily be done. (mil was pleased to
leave it for others!)

He does offer some conjecture on the composition process that would
account for the shape of 3m. While at the Southern gig-£13m Messenger,
Poe began the Grflus story, conceived as a serialized, short narrative.
Parting company before it was completed, and in desperate financial
shape in New York, he sought to follow Harpers' advice in tapping the
richer market for a booklength single narrative by stretching out the
m story, and fusing it onto another story hastily camposed fram a
variety of fictional and nonfictional sea travel literature-—su‘*xnitted
by a "desperate Poe" (222).

In 1966 Sidney Moss wrote a widely-read essay building upon Cecil's
two-narrative theory. He added little, save the observation that the
recurrent themes of deception, revolt, or perversity which critics have
noticed do not prove that Pym is unified. Rather, it merely confirms
that there are bound to be common thematic elements across his work, and
in the two sea stories he imperfectly fused.

Ridgely and Haverstick offer a modification of Cecil's thesis, one
grounded in a much more thorough analysis of Poe's composition process
and sources than Cecil's or Moss's. The period in question, straddling
Poe's first stay in New York (February, 1837 to early summer 1.838),

remains "the blank period" (Silverman 1.29). It has yielded the

159

meagerest documentation and contains the greatest gaps in Poe biography.
Nonetheless, the assiduous work of Ridgley-Haverstick has filled in a
great deal of the picture of M's composition inductively, by collating
the information that can be culled from within the text, with the few
facts available about Poe's activity during this time.

They agree with Cecil that Poe's primary motivation was to piece
together a book . They argue that Em was composed over a much longer
period of time than had been supposed; that it was in fact composed in
starts and stops fram Fall of 1836 to as late as July, 1838, in discrete
stages: that both the storyline and the text camposed in each stage
varied and took their shape from secondary materials Poe had at hand.

They argue that in fact m is five separate narratives: in later
articles, Ridgely revised this to four texts/stages, which remains the
most widely accepted account: (1) The "Messenger text," which takes Pym
to the mutiny in chapter four, was interrupted in January 1837 by the
move to New York. Post of this was published in the January and
February numbers under Poe's name, projecting itself as a short,
serialized, episodic fiction, after the manner of Robinson Cage; and
Washingtm-Irving's wilderness adventure Astoria, both of which he
reviewed in 1836.

(2) Unable to find employment in New York, he returned to the sea
story in Spring, 1837 with an eye to protracting it into the long
narrative Harpers' had advised. The "voyage narratives section,"
carrying Pym to the end of the 9.12% story, draws heavily upon the
popular mariner's narratives of shipwreck and adventure, purportedly
factual, melodramatic and subjective in tone. Pym's and Augustus's ages

were advanced two years, and the Preface seems to have been added at

160

this point, to account for the appearance of the first two chapters in
the Messenger under his own name.

(3) The changes in chapter thirteen between the Grampus and £222.
‘ggy stories that Cecil noted indicate to Ridgely the second break. ‘With
the _J_a_n£ guy chapters, 13-24, the narrative takes on the tone and aim of
factual, more objective accounts of south seas exploration. Having
eXhausted the former narrative line, he picked it up again when a new
controlling idea struck‘him, that is, to engage Pym in south seas
exploration. Poe borrowed and copied heavily, above all fram the 1832
Harpers's bestseller Naggative of Four VOyages by Benjamin Morrell,
ghostwritten by Samuel Woodworth, and Jeremiah N. Reynolds' April 1836
address to the Congressional Committee of Naval Affairs advocating a
government expedition. John Cleves Symues' Mania is a heavy
influence on the events in the more fantastic passages. Two facts
suggest that this section was composed in late 1837 or early 1838: The
new thrust coincides with a resurgence of public interest in this
subject, inspired by renewed congressional debate about whether to fund
a south.seas expedition for exploration (Ridgely-Haverstick 231).4

The second fact suggesting an interim here is the alteration of
Harpers' publiShing schedule as a result of the Panic of 1837. In JUne
Harpers announced that due to economic conditions it was stopping the
presses for all books but "those that were well advanced by early May"
(Eugene Exman, qtd. in Ridgely "Growth" 35). ‘While they had received
enough copy to feel sufficiently confident to announce in way that Egg
was "nearly ready for publication" (qtd. in Ridgely and HaverstiCk 227),
evidently it was not close enough to carpletion to then proceed with,

and publication did not occur until August of 1838.

161

(4) The final stage, the "Stephens-Keith material," consists mainly
of the first of two Chapters numbered 23 in the first edition, and the
afterword entitled "the." Ridgely and HaverstiCk present irresistible
evidence that this linguistic material involving the language of the
Tsalalians, the inscriptions on Tsalal, and the "Note" author's comments
upon them, is a very late interpolation.5 They come primarily from
John L. Stephens' Incidents of Travel_ig_§gyptLyA£abia Petraea, and the
Hbly Land (1837), reviewed by Poe in October, 1837; Alexander Keith's
Igyigence of the Truth of the Chgistigp Religion, which discusses
biblical prophesies pertaining to "the dispersal of races to the earth's
farthest reaches" (Ridgely "Growth" 34): and Gesenius's Hebrew and
English Lexicon of theygld Testament, whidh contributed words and
figures.6

th that Ridgely and Haverstick think there is anything to all
this. Poe's intention as well as his text changed drastically, driven
not by any organic, single design but by the sources he was able to
access at different times, as he sought to pad, protract, splice, and
piece together a book to answer pressing financial needs. Most sections
show signs of hasty composition, and, despite Cecil's claim, are full of
discrepancies and inconsistencies within themselves. The ending is the
"lame anti-climax" of a hoax, with Pym dying after an implausible
salvation, a postscript editor whose explanations explain nothing, "two
or three final chapters" lost while "the above were in type," and a text
that covers only one—ninth of the journey's thmespan. The great white
figure and the linguistic material are diversions to deflect our
attention from a narrative that is broken off even as it was being put

to press. Sounding like Barth twenty years later, they conclude that

162

"what gm finally offers is not mystery but mystification, not a problem
for serious explication but... meaningless complication" (237).

Scholarship since has tended to confirm Ridgely-Haverstick's
account, with Burton Pollin's source and textual work answering many
questions about Poe's reading and methods, but not significantly
altering their model. An attexpt was made by Alexander Hammond in his
1978 "The Composition of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym: Notes
Toward a Re-examination." Traces of rapid and careless writing
suggested to him a briefer, not a greater span for the composition. To
support his thesis that M was completed by Spring 1937, he offers five
items of evidence, involving several documents and their timing. Most
of the discussion, for example, is given to the handwritten copyright
entry Harpers' submitted on June 10, 1937.To Ridgely and Haverstick, it
slowed traces of late alteration, specifically the addition of
references to the South Seas and Antarctica, substituting for a short
original subtitle, which was crossed out and erased. This was an
attempt to make it conform to the title page and the completed
narrative, which was set to print sometime after May, 1838. Ridgely and
Haverstick concluded that a substantial portion of the text as well as
the final title probably had not been campleted before Spring 1838.
Hammond testifies that the only cancelled writing that remains legible
is identical to the final subtitle, and argues that even if it were
different, that would not necessarily mean it had been added
significantly later. Moreover, the ink's properties were identical in
all the writing except the marginal note that announced the book was
deposited August 1, 1838.

Hammond concludes that there is no evidence for discrete stages and

163

the "many narratives" that ruin the book's unity. He offers little in
the way of critical conclusions. Like Ridgely-Haverstick, he views PM
as a "hoax," a "patchwork affair" and a "failure." But he does argue
that it is completed, and that the surprising ending is "fully in
keeping with the patterns of deception and inversion in the book as a
whole.. . designed to frustrate expectation (19); and he notes that the
the implications of a unified composition process hold open the
possibility of a unified design and a single narrative (17). While many
critics since have acted upon this implication, typically they have not
felt it necessary to repudiate Ridgley-Haverstick, on the assumption
that a unified design does not require a shorter or single composition
period, and on the perception that, while Hamond contributes important
information that modifies Ridgely-Haverstick, he "falls short of
establishing that the text reached its final state by the time of the
initial copyright," as Moldenhauer recently put it (Kopley _Po_e'_s; 76).
Burton Pollin adds to our understanding of the composition in his
recent source study, "Poe's Life Reflected in His Work." Building on
Ridgely-Haverstick, he indicates the kinds of materials at Poe's
disposal during his career, and how they changed with Poe's shifting
residence and professional standing. In neither Richmond nor New York
did he have access to public or university libraries, or to the private
collections of very many individuals. As for private collections, there
was no 'literary circle' in Richmond, and he had little intercourse with
that of New York that would avail him of collections there. Pollin
demonstrates that his principle resources were for the most part
bookstores, the private collections of a few friends, review copies of

books that came to him at his editorial posts, and back issues of the

164

magazine for which he was working. Pollin's brilliant, original
reconstruction conveys overall a sense of the astonishing poverty of
resources as a negative vector in the composition of Pvm especially, for

which he was necessarily so dependent on others' writings.

Source Scholarship

The other great extrinsic support for the argument against Eyg_is source
study. Reconstruction of Poe's sources has been ongoing and piecemeal,
with many contributors. There has been recognition from the beginning
of the influence of certain travel narratives, factual and fictitious,
verisimilar and fantastic, among them Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's
Travels, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Captain Frederick
Marryat's Peter Sigple (1835). The nineteen-thirties and -forties saw
the literary backdrop of 2m begin to emerge. To name a few highlights,
David MCKeithan established in 1933 the indebtedness to Archibald
Duncan's The Mgriner's Chgoniglg and Morrell's Narrative of Eggg,
voyagese: Robert Rhea (1930) and others later fleshed out the links with
Jeremiah Reynold's ideas and writing, and the deep personal and
professional connection Poe seems to have felt with.him; J. 0. Bailey
(1942) developed the deep Shaping influence of John Cleve Symmes and
§yggonia: A Voygge of Discovery, expressing the theory that the earth
is hollow, and the interior was accessible through waterways at the
poles. Randel Helms (1972) sketched out the extensive use of Jane
Porter's 1831 Sir Edward Seaward's Narrative of His Shigggeck. J. V.
Ridgely developed suggestions by Wbodberry that Poe used Astoria, while
Sidney Kaplan fleShed out Wbodberry's identification of Stephens'

W-

165

Recent source scholarship has uncovered new influences and disclose
an even greater range in Poe's use of sources. In "Poe's reading of
Myth: The White Vision of Arthur Gordon Pym," Carol Peirce and
Alexander Rosee III examine the conscious uses Poe made of myth. The
authors discuss Poe's familiarity with the work of major mythographers,
such as Jacob Bryant's A New System; or, an A_nalysis of Antient
M (1807), Charles Anthon's Cfissical Dictionary. .. , and George
Stanley Faber' Origins of Pagan Idolatg. . . . Poe appropriated widely
from these materials, the authors suggest, in order to imbue
his text with a mythic resonance, and to graft it onto rich genealogical
lines. They focus with extended analysis on Faber's study of Celtic
mythology, and find throughout gm numerous allusions and references to
Wales, Welsh festivals and seasons, tte Arthurian legend, and, in the
shrouded white figure, an image of the "White Goddess," the ancient
maternal deity in We image all Celtic goddesses and queens were bound
up. Developing a source first suggested by Woodberry, John Irwin (1980)
argued that the visual properties of the shrouded white figure might
have been inspired by David Brewster's Letters on Natural Magic (1831),
while Selma Brody postulates a much more pervasive presence in the
'special effects' throughout the book, in her thorough 1989 analysis.
Joseph Moldenhauer (1992) analyzes the possibility of influence from the
Icelandic sagas chronicling Vinland exploration, two of which were
included in the . collection of pre-Columbian Nordic narratives that
appeared in 1837, Antiggitates Americanae.... J. Lasley Dameron (1992)
suggests that the exotic polar phencnena Pym encounters came f ran the
descriptions of William Scoresby, Jr. 's factual Journal of a VoEge to

the Northern Whale-Fishery. . .off West Greenland (1823) . He concludes

166

from this that we ought not resort to the supernatural in
interpretations of such phenomena as the veined water of Tsalal, the
gray curtain-like vapor of the aurora, the shower of a powdery
substance, and the iceberg-like great white figure, all of which
Scoresby witnessed, describing and explaining them in his Journal as
natural phenomena.

In 1981 Pollin gathered ‘ the source scholarship to date in his
massive, annotated edition of Em, The Imgginary Voyage_s, Volume One of
his projected Cogected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Notations, tables,
and other materials fill 210 pages (excluding the 153-page text).
Patrick Quinn counted over 200 textual and factual errors that Pollin
has identified or incorporated from previous scholarship (Ketterer
"Tracing" 237): but even more than flaws, the notes and essays identify
source materials, not only by the source, but by the incidence, sentence
by sentence. (Thus, there are over 100 entries for Benjamin Morrell in
the index, for instance.) By his emphases, Pollin speaks loudly of m
as a pastiche of errors and purloinings. But in his introduction, he
anticipates and tries to counter this impression: "It is unjust to
censure borrowings in a book which was satirical in its parodic aims and
playful and whimsical in its general technique." Rather, Poe's
borrowing was legitimate and enriching within the context of his aim.
He did so to parody the fictitious and purportedly factual adventure
tales: to vivify an unfamiliar setting: and to "fill out a book for
which the initial inspiration may have flagged" (17).

While his explicit critical statelents are carefully bracketed in
the introduction, they clearly grow out of his scholarship. Pollin

argues that it is not Poe but the critics who have failed, in looking

167

for deep thematic unity and profound truths in a work with Em's
characteristics. Here is a text largely culled from other sources, so
thickly that one-third of its paragraphs Show traces of his sources, in
verbatim copying, close paraphrase, or similar situations and details;
one that obviously parodies many of the sources it uses: one that is
replete with "many jokes and ludicrous effects." It clearly moves about
from one narrative logic to another, as they become exhausted: fram
parody to shock to fantasy, etc, drawing upon appropriate secondary
materials. Pollin sees whimsy and levity as the dominant effect. The
fact that this view resuscitates much of the contemporary response (for
the first time, after a century) is no small mark in his favor.

In the relatively slight intention evident from within, then, M
succeeds admirably: Poe had a dual aim of hoaxing the juvenile reader,
or anyone else, and "playfully bantering" with the mature reader; as we
have seen in chapter two, both effects are evident in the reactions of
contemporary readers. It is in this respect, Pollin argues, that "the
extraordinary originality and individuality. . . transcend both his
reliance upon a peculiar assortment of stimuli and the seemingly
adventitious and even mercenary motives which produced the novel in four

stages" (Kopley Poe's 95-96).

 

Textual Analysis
Pollin's source and textual scholarship will certainly endure, as has

Ridgely and Haverstick's reconstruction of the camposition process,
useful for critics and scholars whatever stand they take. But they are
of special use as support for the other critics who argue against M's

merit. Robert L. Carringer draws richly upon compositional history in

168

his "Circumscription of Space and the Form of Poe's Arthur Gordon Pvm"
(1974), but he grounds his indictment solidly in textual analysis. The
Narrative falters and collapses soon after Pym is brought up on deck of
The Grggpus. "The rest of the story is Characterized by irresolution
and its various symptoms: an episodic structure, a series of pointless
incidents and pranks, and blatant copying from sources" (506). Every
new start runs aground, and the cryptograms and postscript are contrived
to "divert the reader's attention from an unsatisfactory ending" (514).
The problems, he suggests, are illuminated by our understanding of
his imaginative predisposition: Even if financial pressures to write a
long work had not been a factor, the narrative premise of a romantic
adventure "committed Poe to writing a far longer story than he was
accustamed to, [and] forced him to continually write against his own
natural impulses and to violate what would come to be his most deeply
held critical convictions" (506). The form he chose was one whiCh.was
outward-looking, expansive, and open, and given over to self-discovery
and identity formation. But Poe had already developed a negative
aesthetic. The imaginative cannitment that had emerged in his fiction
was toward the destruction of identity—by means of physical
disintegration, psychological terror, and the delimdtation of space,
"usually the dimdniShing space of a life-threatening enclosure" (508).
Moreover these were not only matters of theme but of technique. As
Poe said in "Philosophy of Composition," "a close circumscription of
gpggg is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident:--it
has the force of a frame to a picture.... It concentrate[s] the
attention" (original emphasis) (Essays 21). Wflth.disastrous

consequence, Carringer opines, Poe perforce used techniques that were

169

wholly inappropriate to the narrative problems that emerged. Thus, for

instance, it is not the open sea and the Antarctic wilderness that poses
danger but improbable burials and confinements; and Pym does not grow or
discover himself, but is gradually destroyed, body and mind, and merely

discovers bizarre phenomena he cannot interpret. Pym; is thus marred by

an unmanageable tension between the form as a whole and techniques used

to propel the narrative, resulting in "a general collapse of intention"

and "a series of aborted tales" (515).

In a study previously unnoticed in the bibliographic record,
Richard Fletcher attacks Poe's craft in his Pm chapter in almost every
respect, despite an otherwise high regard for Poe expressed in his _Tlg
Stylistic Develoggnt of Edggr Allan Poe (1973). His methodical,
detailed inductive analysis ignores entirely campositional questions,
and thus serves as a kind of complement to Ridgely-Haverstick. His
chief concern is style, which he argues is vague and elusive, with
spurts of "purple prose at its worst." Explication of several
paragraphs reveals an impoverished vocabulary relying heavily on a few
basic words and their synonyms for an erotional effect, and generally
careless diction, with respect to denotative meaning. As a protagonist,
Pym himself is "more a name or a [Gothic] type than someone
conjecturably human" (149). He finds Poe's narrative patterns here
extremely frustrating: a tendency to repeat the same event, "often
three or four times" (150); to present events or descriptive passages
for no other purpose than "to maintain forward movement" (152); and to
trace long, circuitous routes to get to a point (for instance, the
series of nightmares and illusions leading up to the appearance of the

dog), only to find that whatever symbolic import might have been

170

intended "in this mixed bag of goods is lost in a flood of Gothic and
Victorian tears" (153) . He concludes that Poe created "complexities of
narrative pattern that outran his abilities to improvise," and that the
"mechanical, " abortive conclusion betrays the fact that "his own powers
of invention finally ran out of steam" (153).

In another unnoticed interpretation of M, Stuart Levine came to a
similar conclusion in his gym chapter of _I-Ldgar Poe: Seer and Craftgma__n,
dismissing it as "rambling" hackwork. He concludes that even as such it
fails, and "no editor, even of the lower-grade adventure pulps, would
consider publishing as.. . confused and ineffective a work" (238), though

of course the sixty-seven American editions tell a different story.

3

mdels of Coherence

Many others have argued for a models of structural unity, thetatic
significance, and a coherent and aesthetically interesting narrative
logic. One of the first was W. H. Auden, in his brief but influential
introductory remarks in a widely-circulated 1950 Rinehart edition of
selected works. He chastised the academic ccnmnmity for neglecting m
and _E_u_r_§_k§_, "among Poe's most important works," the former, "one of the
finest adventure stories ever written, an object lesson in the art." In
recanrending it, he noted not only the variety of adventure, from
natural disaster to exotic natives to "supernatural nightmare," but the
way in which they were interwoven: "Each leads credibly to the next. "

Style alternates between calculated vagueness and "the minutest details ,

171
figures, diagram," depending upon the need to "preserve illusion" and
"maintain credibility." (Carlson Reccgnition 220, 222). Brief as they
are, some have suggested that these remarks called gym for the first
time to the attention of the larger academic community, stimulating the
first critical commentary beyond the perfunctory comments in Poe

biographies and source studies.

Structure

We have looked at some of the pioneering studies in this regard
last chapter, and will look at others later, depending upon where their
emphases locate them. For example, Patrick Quinn notes that by
conventional formal standards m "must be set down a failure," but
if we suspend these and view the voyage as oneiric and symbolic, a
"voyage of the mind," we find a structural tour de force, in which
"with no apparent discontinuities, Pym's voyage begins at
Nantucket and ends in nirvana" (203) . Edward Davidson acknowledges
structural flaws, but finds a f ive-part organic structure that both
symbolically and literally traces "the emergence and growth of the;
knowing and thinking self" (161) . Harry Ievin sees an archetypal
tragic pattern of the dislocated, anxious wandering American, who
moves from disintegrating society, to malevolent nature, to a glimpse
of the supernatural , only to prove unworthy of grace (1 17) . Sidney

Kaplan sees a social, racial, and theological allegory of white and

black.‘7
Later studies that emphasize formal properties in their discussion

build on these seminal readings. Charles O'Donnel (1962) , James Cox

(1968), and Victor Vitanza (1974) advance approbative views of M based

172

upon structural analysis. Building on Davidson, O'Donnell was the first
to develop a detailed model of structural symmetry. "From Earth to
Ether: Poe's Flight in Space" (1962) maps an inverse parallel structure
built around the Narrative's midpoint, Pym's rescue by the Jane Guy.

The plot sequence leading to that event involves: Pym setting sail in a
small boat (the Aggy which wrecks, and from which he is rescued by a
ship: confinement/burial (in the hold); treachery and the killing of the
treacherous; and sailing toward the Equator in an uncontrollable vessel
(the Gra_x_mpus), fram which he is again rescued (the Jane Guy). The
second half works out the same sequence of episodes in reverse order,
with the different vessels, treacherous natives replacing treacherous
sailors, and the South Pole substituting for the Equator. He points to
many smaller unmistakeable correspondences, such as the fact that Pym
and Too-Wit react powerfully to a mirror each chances upon at identical
points in the first and second half, respectively. These indicate that
Poe intended his readers to 1) notice this mirror-like pattern: and 2)
infer fram it a physical rescue of Pym at the pole. He goes on to argue
that the inversion principle in plot and structure is a key to the
symbolic meaning. The rescues of Pym from all kinds of danger are
ironic, for they don't alter the tone of dread or the certitude of Pym's
march toward physical and mental annihilation. This includes the final
rescue, for Pym dies upon return anyway. Yet the narrative
simultaneously drifts toward Pym's supernal viSion, the white figure,
and Pym himself drifts away from man and "the earth and earthly senses"
in his "search for universal being" (46). Pym's physical journey of
disintegration, then, is an inverse reflection of his spiritual journey

to unity and ultimate being. M is a dramatization of the conflicted

173

condition of man, an attempt to work out metaphorically "tension between
the needs of the body and soul, unity and individuality" (43).

Vitanza, in "Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of A_rthur Gordon Pym:
An Anatamy of Perverseness" (1974) , formulates a structure that accords
with the infantile- and fetal-regressive model incorporporated in
Bonaparte's and Bezanson's readings of content. He argues for a tripart

structure patterned on the nine-month gestations cycle.

inane;

Numerous critics have claimed unity and merit for m on the basis
of coherent and/or recurrent themes. In his The Rationale of Deception
(1978) , David Ketterer attempts an analysis of deception as the dominant
there in Poe's work, on the theory that Poe's core aim is to challenge
the reliability of man's perception of reality, inherently distorted by
three coordinates, space, time and the "subjective inner self,"
consequently leaving him "in a state of deception" (1). His analysis of
deception as theme and technique in m adds nothing to the thorough
treatment of this thete by Patrick Quinn. He reiterates (with
attribution) Charles O'Donnell's structure, and then merely reiterates
the plot, identifying and enmerating examples of deception (reversals,
pseudocrises, ironies, discrepancies, etc.), right up to the final
sentence; no larger point is made. He occasionally glances off
substantive or intriguing points, but brackets them as a parenthesis or
clause and moves on to another example, never to return. Tiger
represents the "perverse tigerism of the world": 'Dirk Peters' is
'Arthur' Gordon Pym's Excalibur: and, "As a hybrid Peters is able to

mediate between the white and the black," all offered and dropped

174

without illustration or further comment (130, 131, 132). The Egg
subchapter combines at least two strategums for evading entanglement
within the deeper layers of the text--what we might call criticism by
reiteration and by parenthesis-~though as Quinn and others have shown,
his chosen theme certainly could have carried him there.

Josie P. Campbell offers a brief thematic reading, as her title
indicates: "Deceit and Violence: Motifs in The Narrative of Arthur
Gordon Pvm" (1970). Essentially reiterating O'Donnell's point that the
second half recapitulates the sequence of episodes of the first, she
suggests that the literal events of the first half are rendered
symbolically in the second. More recently Kenneth Silverman has argued
in his new biography, Neverending Romance: A Life of Edgar A_._g_og
(1992), for the unity of m on the basis of a carefully interwoven
thematic pattern of "the breakdown of order" (134), in which instances
of physical and social disorder (the confused stowage of the Gm and
the mutiny, for instance) in an escalating intensity reflect the gradual
disintegration of Pym's mind.

James M. Cox's "Edgar Poe: Style as Pose" (1968) is a slight
reading emphasizing perversity as a theme, correlating Pym's perverse
longings with Poe's capricious tendency to both disgust and hoax his
readers.

Like structural analyses and thutic interpretations, studies of
M's symbolism will be discussed more appropriately else-mere,
particularly in chapters three and five. We turn now to stylistic

interest .

.175

sees

Allen Tate noted that Poe's style was uneven. In his best fiction,
such as "William‘Wilson" and the tales of deduction, it displays an
"eighteenth century directness and elegance," and is "at its sustained
best in point of sobriety and restraint." He could be "a lucid and
dispassionate expositor,... capable of clear and rigorous logic" (Regan
47). But he was also capable of Choking the reader with "glutinous"
bathos and heavily-layered, even ludicruous Gothicism, as in "Ligeia."
One could not, therefore, entirely gainsay Alduous Huxley and YVor
Winters in their identification of Poe's style with vulgarity and
"ungrammatical rubbish" (Regan 48). Similarly, some Characters are
inanimate and lack dimensions of human sensibility. As others have, he
points out the "unreal" and "mechanical" quality in much of the prose:
"Everything in Poe is dead": furniture, nature, and human beings alike:
even the classical and Christian traditions themselves are strangely
devitalized in his work (Regan 48, 49). But if this reflects sate
deficiency in Poe's sensibility, Tate argues, it also reflects the
peculiar "business" Poe was about. His purpose lay in the intense
stimulation of sensation unqualified by moral imagination. This is the
sensibility of his narrators, and in their terrifying world, they
present Poe's protoemodern vision of disintegrative experience.

.gflg, of course, features the widest possible range of Poe's style,
including the unmoored subjective voice as intensely solipsistic as that
of "Ligeia," all the clarity and directness of "the ordonnance of
eighteenth.century prose" that Tate sees in the detective stories; and
the "sobriety and formal elegance" he sees in Poe's best critical

writing (Carlson Rggpggition 241); one can only regret that Tate never

176

conmented extensively on the work. There are at least two direct
references: He implied that M fails because Poe's powers of
verisimilitude fail when they are applied to his "obsessive" theres. On
the other hand, he elsewhere commented that it contains passages "that
have the lucidity and intensity of Swift" (Regan 42, Carlson Recogpition
241). Others have noticed patches of brilliance, for instance in Pym's
dreams in the Grmus hold, in the account of the deathship, and
especially in the prophetic tones of the final journal entries. The
narrative ends in a sonorous cadence that has been particularly singled
out: " . . . 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 the snow"
(24.14). Malcolm Cowley called the passage fran which this canes the
finest single passage Poe ever wrote.

Richard L. Harp, John P. Hussey, and M. L. Rosenthal offer analyses
of M's craft that enphasize style as a strength. The first two are
rather slight. But in a recent call to a return to close textual
analysis, M. L. Rosenthal offers exemplary stylistic analysis of Em and
”the City in the Sea" to denonstrate the possibilities of the inductive
method in disclosing the affective dynamics of the elements within a
text. In "Hurrah for Longinus! Lyric Structure and Inductive Analysis"
(1989), he laments the current state of criticiu, dominated by
deductive theoretical application, in which books and articles neither
quote from nor analyze the text they are studying. He seems to be
saying of criticism what Hegel once said of history: "Instead of
writing history, we are always beating our brains to discover how

history ought to be written" (Philosophy of History, qtd. in Jay

177

Scrivener 277). But a poem, he argues, echoing Cleanth Brooks, "does
not produce abstract meaning," and therefore the deductive method cannot
arrive at the core effects of the individual work. Criticism should
work in the vein of Longinus, and of the New Critics, attempting
objective analysis of a text isolated as much as possible, just as a
scientist seeks to isolate his or her object. Despite the fact that
"our instruments of Observation are internal and subjective ones and
therefore affected by many contingencies... we'have the same duty as
[scientists] to try to avoid" such prejudices as "rigidity of thought,"
"private emotion," "personal opinion not based on data" (33).

He feels that despite its length and variegated styles, 2m
essentially Should not be read differently than a lyric; in both cases
"you're observing bodies of language streaming through time and
gathering shape as they move toward a state of equilibrium within 3
contained process" (32). .Eflm is a masterwork, he feels, with a.
deliberate, inner logic. USing not smooth progression, but startling
transitions and episodes eadh discrete enough to have its own "separate
enntional melstran," Poe "catapults" Pym and the reader in escalating
intensity toward "irreversible disaster" (41). As varied as the
experiences are, the narrative gets its bearings from the two "most
terror-drenched passages," the Dutch deathShip and the Tsalal episode.
They are a sort of ground-zero for the two principal, escalating
counterpressures driving Pym and the narrative, the "external pressure"
ruShing Pym toward disaster and death, creating the sense of dread: and
the internal drive impelling Pym forward, in his perverse Imaging for
fear, suffering, and ultimately death. Both result in progressive "loss

of control, understanding, and finally identify" (42). Rosenthal

178

examines individual passages to demonstrate how Poe carefully modulates

this tension with alternating styles.

Narrative Strategy

Clearly Rosenthal's stylistic analysis serves a set of ideas about
Poe's narrative strategy. A final kind of formal analysis we will look
at produces models of narrative logic and Poe's strategies in moving his
narrative and generating plot. The boundary between these and
O'Donnell's, Vitanza's and others' structural 'maps' is conceptual
rather than empirical; but in general they go beyond these rather static
schemata, as, for instance, physiology might be said to go beyond
anatomy. These studies generally come later and benefit from
structuralist theory, and they tend to be more diverse, penetrating
and lively than those we have already looked at. One of the benefits of
structuralism is that it made novel and experimental texts more
accessible conceptually. Recognition of diverse narrative dynamics has
helped the critical cmmunity to revise even its most fundamental
criteria, instituting the notion that, as Fish succinctly put it,
"literature is language around which we have drawn a frame." We have
since been more likely and more able to look at works, like gm, which
may not reflect traditional formal values, such as internal coherence
and harmony or which may manifest and achieve these in unconventional
ways.

Most narrative analysts, some of which will be dealt with here and
sane in Chapters Five and Six, regard it as a problematic, contradictory
text , which engages the reader in experimental , even unprecedented ways .

Emery model envisions an ironic double narration of some sort, involving

179
satire, whether on literary forms, social practice, epistimological
assumptions, or, in the hoax readings, his reading public. Though they
typically equivocate, these critics are more likely than most to
confront the core question of whether the text represents uncontrolled
contradiction or controlled irony.

An important distinction in narrative theory which'has helped
critics to find logic within 22m is the difference between "classical"
and "transformational" organizing principles within plot discussed by
such theorists as Russians Mikhail Bakhtin and Yuri Lotman, and Italian
Franco Mbretti. In the predominantly "classical" work (the terms are
Lotman's) plot arises out of and is tightly arranged by the logic of a
predetermined end. Epitomized in Dickens, for instance, the classical
plot is essentially disrupted tranquility that moves inevitably toward a
stable social system which is to say that it returns to its starting
point. Transformational plot consists of more loosely arranged
episodes. In a linear pattern, plot unfolds as it goes; or, more
precisely, in the dialectic between foregoing episodes and the
protagonist's momentary situation. Eaceuplified for instance in Goethe's
Bildgggsroman novels, plot and outcome are potentially unpredictable:
both hero and society are subject to change, as the rigid moral and
social order come under attadk. The distinction is essential to grasp
the modern novel, which, as Bakhtin points out, is grounded uniquely
among literary forms in the unstable society and heteroglot discourses
of the present. Whatever might be said of premodern times, we can say
that individuals and societies do change profoundly, and over relatively
short periods of time in mdernity. New literary form inevitably arose

to reflect this situation.

180

gm itself straddles the modern age. As Tate pointed out, the
smooth, expository surface of portions achieves the literary ideals of
neoclassical elegance and formalism. Pym himself embodies
eighteenth-century ideals of education and faith in rationalism, as he
systematically tries to classify the life forms and 'philological'
phenomena he encounters. Yet there could be no more indeterminate text.
To note just one aspect: In the progression of novelty and the
escalation of terror, Pym's narrative voice becomes increasingly
laconic, giving over the narration to diminishing journal entries, until
it falls silent in the face of inconceivable experience. The postscript
is equally silent about Pym himself and the nature of any
transformation.

A. Robert Lee stresses both the indeterminacy and the double play
in his "'Impudent and ingenious fiction': Poe's The; Narrative of Arthur :
Gordon M" (1987) . m overcomes deep flaws to emerge as a masterwork
of innovative design that looks ahead to Joyce and modernism. The
"impudence," frcm Pym's own mouth, is in the double significance of
virtually every aspect. Its formal features are all parodic: a
mock-epic title, a mock-confessional preface, a mock adventure, with
bogus scholarship—all cmplicated by the fact that, unlike most satire,
Poe is playing straight up as well as ironic, making it uniquely
doubly-significant. Certain passages appear conventional, until Poe
turns expectations on their head: a rescuing ship turns out to be a
"floating cemetery," a group of childlike natives becomes the hub of a
theological "counterworld" where the "infernal" is uppermost (129) .

The genius of Poe's fictive strategy is evident in his ability to

move Pym through such complicated, multi-layered episodes without

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accreting so much complexity as to grind the narrative to a halt. lee
suggests he achieves this with what he calls the "self-consuming" text,
in which by various devices he "dissolves" episodes as Pym passes them.
For instance, the episodes are given a dreamlike quality that
disconnects them from what follows and makes both Pym and the reader
forget them. Once aboard the Jane Guy, Pym dismisses the harrowing
traumata of the Grmus "rather as a frightful dream from which we have
happily awakened, than events which had taken place in sober and naked
reality" (14.4). Pym's traits, perspectives, maturity level, and even
his age change without explanation when others are needed for what is
coming. Stripped of memory, as Pym moves south beyond the known world,
both world and text become a new blank for "total invention" and Poe's
own "pure enciphers" (127). Lee does not identify any such final
'enciphers'; on the contrary, he suggests in an ingenious but
unfortunately undeveloped insight that the final white figure is another
blank, and that Pym's story and his very consciousness is "eviscerated"
and "put up for transfer" to the reader, who is "enjoined, even defied,
into taking on the next stage of imagining" (131).

An insightful reading relating M's narrative strategies to the
rest of Poe's stories is Paul John Eakin's "Poe's Sense of an Ending"
(1973). Poe's central concern, Eakin contends, is "the problem of the
soul's quest for final knowledge" (242): each is an experiment carrying
the hero to the farthest reaches of consciousness, even to the point of
death itself, and back again, with the "exciting lmowledge--the
never-to—be—imparted secret whose attainment is destruction, " in the
words of the narrator of "MS. Found in a Bottle." Whatever form the

quest takes , however, the narrative contends with the paradox that

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knowledge beyond the limits of the senses and reason perforce will be
ineffable in human terms, despite the desire.

But the power and success of what Eakin calls the "Lazarus f iction"
is in the aesthetic conception of the "miraculous traveller from the
spirit-land," not the divine information itself (244). Poe probably
knew the promise was undeliverable; what he was trying to work out,
Eakin hypothesizes, was the aesthetic dilema: if the hero dies, we
lose not only the revelation, but the element of the miraculous survival
(e.g., "The Facts in the Case of M. Valderar"); if he lives, he must be
arrested at some point on the threshold, and can only talk about an
imminent revelation (as in "MS. Found in a Bottle") or he returns
transfigured but with nothing to say (e.g. , "Ligeia," "A descent into
the Maelstrom").

Eakin contends that nowhere did Poe apply more pressure on this
dil“ than in PM, both in the experimental techniques in the
narrative progression, and in the remarkably rich final image of Pym 'on
the threshold.‘ The plot pattern is Pym's repeated pursuit of, approach
to, and withdrawal from the verge of transcendence, varying in
escalating intensity and form (near—death, nightmare, delirium,
insanity, ultimately death itself.) Each is accompanied by Pym's
obsessive attempts at recording each experience.

In the end, Poe deliberately creates the ping of incanpletion
(even having the postscript author judge it as such)--a "sleight of hand
trick" to disguise the truth that he is in fact giving us a double
ending: "Pym survivedu-but he died" (251). Eakin argues that the
narrative culminates in a rich, equivocal image of the traveller who has

by now accreted a miraculous nature even before he crosses the verge.

183
Transcendence inheres by the "fiction" of its incompleteness and the
fact of his subsequent death: Like Ahab, Pym seems to disappear into
the beyond. At the same time, his return, however brief, warrants his
status as a miraculous Lazarus, laconic but presmmably transfigured.
For this remarkable achievement, gm deserves "a central place" in the
Poe canon: In pushing Pym to the limits of experience, Poe "was pushing
himself to the limits of fiction as well" (255).

Others see gym as doing work other than that of a novel or rmance.
Judith Sutherland, in The Problem Fictions of Poe, James, and
Hawthorne (1984), argues that Poe is in a cat-and-mouse game with the
reader, which Poe expects the reader to win. We have already noted her
observation that the text folds back upon itself to undermine the very
"structuring activity" it has invited, and so becomes a "hermeneutical
nightmare" (14). One response, for instance, is the ever more vigorous
attempts to solve the puzzles, track down puns, find the correspondences
(which are there) at the expense of the "critic's dignity" (17). But she
goes on to suggest that the reader is deliberately teased and deceived
enough to rebel, Opening up a new dimension in the work. Pym eventually
betrays his own obtuseness, and Poe's humor, with his unwitting jokes
and ludicruous responses to the events Poe confronts him with. (For
instance, "Pym cannot comprehend the savages ' reaction to four harmless
objects—the sails, an egg, an open book, a pan of flour" [31]). Dread
and despair within Pym's purview, and humor and irony outside it are the
primary counterpressures, until the reader chooses to disassociate him
or herself from Pym's perspective, and disentangle him/herself from the
text. From that point on a peculiar kind of laughter obtains, though it

is of the "grimacing, " "resentful" kinds of laughter characteristic of

184
Poe, and of a partially-gulled reader.

Evelyn Hinz sees laughter as the primary effect as well, in her
reading of a unique narrative principle at work in m ("'Tekeli-li':
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" [1970] ) . She suggests we have been
reading it wrong: that it is not a "faulty novel," but a perfectly
constructed Menippean satire. She posits that the faulty, halting plot
is not the constitutive element of the narrative; rather its
loose-jointed narrative is a consequence of its satiric aim and its
encyclopedic representation of society, reflecting it back in a
scattershot manner, full of jokes and laughter. In the largest sense,
its " fragmentary" form and "wavering" control suggests "the effect of a
disordered world" (382).

Bruce Weiner, too, argues against the novel as the paradigm for
Pym's narrative logic, in "Novels, Tales, and Problems of Form in _Th_e_
Narrative of Arthur Gordon m" (1992). Comparing the conventions of
the nineteenth-century novel with the sensational "tale of effect" form
the Fliglish magazine Blackwood's was famous for, and demonstrating Poe's
intimate familiarity with both, he maintains that Poe was appropriating
and experimenting with the latter. The formal flaws of 3m, whatever
criteria one applies, are compensated for by its importance as a
fruitful field of development for Poe's craft in the horror "tale of
effect"-as evident in the subsequent appearance of masterworks
"Ligeia," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "William Wilson," all
published within two years of m.

Like Hinz and Weiner, Lisa Gitelman argues for coherence on the
basis of Ms caplet interaction with genre. In "Arthur Gordon Pym

and the Novel Narrative of Edgar Allan Poe" (1993), she suggests that

185
critics who condemn Em on the basis of its problematic formal
properties have failed to sufficiently consider the form and nature of
the exploration narrative. The lengthy digressions, the discontinuity
among episodes, and the anticlimactic ending in M are not
irregularities but conventions of the genre, inevitable by the very
nature of exploration. She attempts to show that Poe self-consciously
mimicks form (in addition to copying language) from his pretexts to
offer 3’! as a typical exploration narrative, but that along the way he
pokes fun at the excess and crudity of the genre as a whole. He effects
the latter not only by his own rhetorical exaggeration and by the
preposterousness of events, but by nautical metaphors with satiric
reference. For example, the "clumsy stowage" responsible for wrecking
the Grms in a storm hints at a similar quality in Morrell's Egg;
Voyages, the very narrative from which he borrowed the stowage material.
Similarly, the leigthy digressions during the Jane Guy voyage constitute
a "factual ballast," typical of narratives trying to earn credulity,
which threatens to sink the reader. And Pym's obtuse, unreliable
narrator mixes fact and fantasy-~as the genre mixes fact and fiction--to
produce a narrative that resembles "that hybrid of modern media,
'info—tainment'" (361).

As both an example and a parodic critique of its genre, Gitelman
calls M a "success" (354). However, in her own discussion of the
genre, Gitelman uncritically conflates the imaginary voyage with the
nonfiction travel journalism from which it arose. Moreover, nothing in
her essay about exploration literature or Poe's use of it will be new to
anyone who has read Pollin, Ridgely, or Spengetann. It is doubtful

whether Gitelman has done so.

Notes

1The notion that the Tsalalians are of Hebraic descent, linking
them to the Lost Tribes, is neither original with Kopley nor farfetched,
being suggested by Poe himself in the Hebraic elements of their
language. See Bailey (1942) and Ridgely (1974). Kopley's elaborations
of the Tsalalians as a degraded remnant of a group of ancient "white
giants" who continued southwards is rather fanciful.

2For example, one segment of the inferential chain runs as
follows, including all evidence presented: the "shrouded white human
figure" must be a penguin, for elsewhere Pym notes that the royal
penguins of Ker-guelen's Island bear a "striking resemblance" to the
"human figure" (14.10). Since the ship that rescues Pym in chapter two
is called "The Penguin," and since it would be "natural and fitting" for
'a ship so named to have a "giant wooden penguin" as a f igurehead (none
is ever mentioned), then what Pym sees is the penguin figurehead of _%
Penggin (Kopley "Secret" 209). No point, there, or conclusion is
adduced from either the plot device or its secrecy, aside from the
putative structure it gives the book in tying the first episode to the
last. Similarly, despite 81 notes in the third essay, I can find only
two items of evidence at the core of his allegorical claim for the
Tsalalian battle: the fact that Jerusalem is called "Ariel" in Isaiah
29:1-2, and the mention of "stakes" and "cords" the Tsalalians have
pulled to start the avalanche that buries the Jane Guy's crew (21.7),
"repeated" from Isaiah 33:20 which refers to stakes and cords as the
metaphoric firm supports of Jerusalem. Incredibly, on this evidence and
reasoning alone, Kopley asserts that m is an "epic" of the fall of
Jerusalem, Poe's answer to Coleridge's challenge in his Table Talk
(1835), that this is "the only subject now remaining for an epic poem"
(qtd. in Kopley "Profound" 150). This is "The ' egy Profound
Under-current' of Arthur Gordon 3m, " in his 1992 essay so entitled.
(The Ariel episode is linked, rather weakly, to Tsalal by the name of
the lumberyard "Pankey 8. Co." near which the boat is docked: As "hey" is
half of "Pankey," "the Ariel is half the key to a_ll of _Pm" (original
emphasis) (147).)

3For instance, the staterent that Augustus years later would
confide to Pym how he felt on the 95m suggests that the death of
Augustus was an abandonment of that narrative line and of an earlier
intention-as does the profound changes in Peters ' personality.

4Poe reviewed Reynolds' Address in January 1837 and evinced great
admiration for the man and his project: and Poe probably received
encouragexent to make use of Morrell from James Harper, who had written
to John L. Stephens on a book he was preparing for Harpers, to utilize
their "plenty of books": "You can just pick out as many as you want. . .
you can dish up soiething" (qtd. in Pollin Imaginagy 9). And Morrell's

186

187

book, ghostwritten at Harpers' request, was the product of much
borrowing itself (Ridgely "Growth" 32).

5For example, the second chapter 23 picks up precisely where 22
leaves off; and the reference the editor of the "Note" makes to the
Wilkes expedition (Pym's veracity will be determined "shortly" by "the
governmental expedition now preparing for the Southern Ocean") suggest
it was written only after the Wilkes expedition was commissioned in
March, 1838. Moreover, the haste evident in the many errors of
carelessness unusual in Poe indicate that probably it was being worked
on even later.

6111 his 1974 "The End of Pym and the Ending of m" Ridgely
suggests that this material also contributed to the "obscurely
suggested" history of the Tsalalians as "derived from an ancient
civilization which dated back to the dispersion of tribes in Old
Testament days" (109).

7For discussion of Quinn see Chapter Three; for Davidson, Levin,
and Kaplan see chapter five.

Chapter Five

"A Correspondent Coloring": The Historical Orientation

In 1992 the first book devoted to Pym appeared, a group of essays
collected by Richard Kopley from the 1987 conference and elsewhere. In
addition to many fine and original insights within the essays, the
outstanding impression Poe's Pym: Critical mlorations makes as a
whole is that the comentary on Pm has become hopelessly scattered.

The collection includes a psychological analysis, source studies,
structural formal models, a deconstruction, a myth study, a postmodern
reading of 13m as a prophesy of Auschwitz, and historical analyses of
nineteenth-century funerary ritual, of Em's economics, and of its
racial politics-«early each of which seeks coherence in its own line of
development rather than in converse with each other.

If the present study is to itself retain coherence, therefore, each
chapter must be a greater umbrella than the previous. This chapter will
entail the historical study of m. If formalist textual analyses
sought to master the text by abstracting it spatially and temporally for
a given poetic system of values, there has been an array of attempts to
contain the text within a historical frame or a literary genealogy

A breakdown of the concerns of the historical critic reveals how
large an umbrella this is. the textbook, for instance, describes them
as: the recreation of the conditions under which the author worked,
including economic, - social, political, and publishing institutions and

factors: the intellectual environment as a determining force; the
188

189
biography, and psychObiography, of the writer; the dating of the text;
and the text itself (Handy and westbrook 305). Clearly, every
generation and approach we have discussed engages in historical
criticism in some sense beyond the very real one of dependence upon the
historian for the text.

Two motives unite the thirty-five or so studies in this chapter:
First, recognizing, as H. Aram‘Veeser puts it, that "every expressive
act is embedded in a network of material practices" (x), these critics
tend to be conscious of the historical determination of language. Their
commitment to causality leads them to conclude that we cannot hope to
finally understand it by trying to abstract it. As Roy H. Pearce put it,

Insofar as language creates, the fact of creation is
inextricable from the point in time of its creation.... The
work of art may well live forever as the creation of a man
like other men before and after'him. But an integral part of
its life, of its formal quality, will derive from the fact
that it was created at a time» and for a time.... [it] can
never be dissociated from either the time in which it was
made or the time in which it is known (360).
Historicist critics take to task any system that tries to dissociate the
text, but their original opposition was to the Rotantic notion that the
genius produced without mundane influence,'his/her work engendered
solely from the individual imagination, or a divine cause behind it.
Melville made much the same point over a century ago, in his early
prdbings into the Shape of a national literature, when he said "great
geniuses are parts of the times; they themselves are the times; and

possess a correspondent coloring" (2166).

190

Second, in these approaches, as much as any, we can see 3m
appropriated for historical or critical agendas comprehending far more
than one text; elucidation of the text is a means, not the end.
Frequently we see it engaged in a symbiotic (at best: at worst,
tautological) relationship with the book or theory within which it is
situated: for instance, 3m accrues meaning and merit by its
envelopment within a coherent model, which it helps to make coherent by
its support as an example. Many of the studies radiate from—~or at
least stand in sore relation to--one of two nodes, national cultural

theory and international roranticism.

1

American Literary Historiography

Political and Cultural Idealism

The New Critical poetic discourse which shaped much of the
comentary in the previous chapter occurred against the backdrop of
American literary historiography, a larger scholarly-critical enterprise
at the heart of the nation's cultural self-image. In one sense it dates
back to the early nineteenth century, with Emerson's, William Ellery
Gaming's, Margaret Fuller's and others' reflections upon a national
cultural identity; but it did not take its definitive shape until the
early- and mid-twentieth century, with such works as V. L. Parrington's
Main Currents in American Thought (1927-30), Norman Foerster's _‘I'l_1_e_
Reintegpretation of American Literature (1928), F. 0. Matthiessen's

American Renaissance (1941), Henry Nash Smith's vimin Land (.1950),

191
Charles Feidelson's Symbolism in AmericaMerature (1953), several
volumes by Perry Miller, and others. These and those that followed were
concerned with defining a distinctly American literary tradition and
distinguishing uniquely American cultural and historical patterns or
'myths.' At the same time, it was trying to establish itself as a
critici- with its own language, criteria, and methodology, independent
of those inherited from England, which effectively subordinated American
literature as provincial and inferior. Despite the diversity of models,
comon characteristics can be discerned among these traditionalists:
They seek, above all, to immerse their theory in historical fact; they
tend to refract American literary history through the American
Renaissance: and, following Henry James' lead in "The Art of Fiction,"
they loosen or widen formal criteria, in order to save American writers
and books that do not meet British criteria. As Peter Carafiol puts it,
Traditional critical standards (verbal richness, architectural
and organic form) stretched themselves to accmodate the
verbal indecorousness and formal irregularities of many
American texts; and interest in the relationship between
literature and America's cultural identity—between belles
lettres and "life"-—blurred traditional boundaries between
strictly literary study and other disciplines and generated
the American Studies movement (10).
The book of paramount influence, of course, is Matthiessen's, but not
merely because he correlated the American Renaissance with mropean and
classical ideas in a way that elevated rather than marginalized American
literature, and not merely because he saw America's highest political

ideals reflected in the literature-—though he did. both. What most

192
elevated the stature of American literature in Matthiessen's work was
his marriage of New Critical poetic theory and standards with literary
historical scholarship. He attended to the formal qualities of the text
as no other literary historian had, and not just of poems, but of
diverse forms of fiction and nonfiction.

A number of literary historians argue that gym is a representative,
and even a seminal text in the development of American literature.
Harry Levin sums up this stand in his renark that the "characteristic
point of view in American fiction may well be that of an adolescent
initiated to manhood by the impact of his adventures," and it is not
"sufficiently appreciated that all of these [the young heroes of
mlville, Twain, Crane, Faulkner, and Hemingway] have as their
archetypal predecessor. . . m" (109) . William Spengemann calls 3m,
with its marriage of travel writing, Ronantic fiction, and American
materials, "the first truly American novel" (139). Paul Zweig, in his
study of the adventure story in Western literature, credits m as the
founding of a "new mythology of adventure" in America (17). And Robert
Carringer calls it "an early version of the characteristic American
rmance," in which Poe pioneered a number of conventions by his
experimentations with extended first-person strategies, the archetypal
interracial companionship, and the narrative tension between an outgoing
voyage and an introspective hero in a process of self-discovery.
Finally, most of those studies which have delineated Pym's influence on
Mopy—Dick and belville ' s other fiction either assume or conclude that
gyg is a kind of imaginative fountainhead for that preeminent text, and
through it for American literature}1

Mining this vein, John Stroupe in "Poe's Imaginary Voyage: Pym as

193

Hero" takes issue with those who have regarded _Pm as an atypical
adventure romance, and Pym as an atypical hero, in his passivity, lack
of maturation, and perversity. Stroupe argues that Pym in fact embodies
all the cultural values and virtues of the quintessential American
romantic hero. In assuming control of the _Jgn_e_ G_uy, and surviving a
mutiny, a shipwreck, and a massacre, he proves himself to be a man of
action, and displays self-reliance, courage, and mental and physical
superiority. Typically, he also stands for his community as a
representative man, "a universalizing sym‘rol of man's conflict with
death and the desire to affirm his own existence" (320). In "'Mr. Pym'
and 'Mr. Poe': The Two Narrators of 'Arthur Gordon Pym'" (1974), John
P. Hussey also nomu'nates Pym for heroic status, arguing that his
adventures prepare him for his ultiute confrontation with death. Paul
Zweig develops a similar logic in a lengthy analysis unnoticed in gm
studies, in his The Adventurer: The Fate of Adventure in the Western
321151 (1973). He links Pym to Odysseus, Gilgamesh, and Beowulf behind
him, and a geneology of American figures ahead of him as heroes obsessed
with adventure for its own sake. It is his "destiny" to transgress
laws, rules, and conventions in order to create the "ecstacy" he derives
from action and danger. Zieeig has a deep appreciation for the sheer
excitement of the story, and captures the sense of rapid movement and
kaleidoscopic sensation it generates.

m is marshalled by American theorists with other angles of vision
as well. Some have seen parallels between Poe's or his narrators'
relentless quest for new knowledge, and America's characteristic
pioneering impulse, though Poe often has been ignored in this

respect.2 William Carlos Williams said eloquently that Poe's

194

"greatness is in that he turned his back and faced inland, to
originality, with the identical gesture of a Boone" (226). In his The
Grand and the Fair: Poe;s_ Landscape Aesthetics and Piggig Techniges
(1984), Kent Ljunquist demonstrates Poe's wide and varied engagenent
with the literature of the wilderness and the frontier. Indeed, a
critic and editor of the time could have hardly avoided it, but
Ljunquist surveys Poe's surprisingly nnmerous reviews of western travel
books, frontier fiction, and nature poetry to support his impressive
claim that no writer "displays greater knowledge" or was "more deeply
immersed" in the materials and imagery of the American landscape than
Poe <3).

A number of literary histories seem to have been built primarily
upon Frederick Jackson Turner's 1898 thesis identifying the frontier as
the most significant shaping force in American society. In Frontier:
American Literature and the American West (1965), Edwin Fussell employs
two familiar elements within 3m to coordinate it precisely within this
tradition: the South Seas setting, along with the Jane Guy's trading
and exploring mission there, as a continuation of the frontier
enterprise; and the chain of concrete allusions to the West, including
Pym's reading of lewis and Clark's journals, the studied similarities
between the Tsalalians and the "barbarous" Indians , and the western
associations of Peters: his "Upsaroka" heritage, his home on the
frontier, his Bowie knife, and that fancy grizzly bear toupé. Ignoring
everything but these familiar signals, Fussell rather dramatically
recasts the text for service to his own thesis.

Similarly, leslie Fiedler observed that "all the attributes of the

highbrow Western are present in [Poe's] novel: the rejection of the

195

family and of the world of women, the secret evasion from home and

the turning to the open sea. . . [and] to the world of pure male
companionship" (393). In an unnoticed discussion of m in his ME.
Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction (1973),
Thonas Philbrick positions Eyn_m_ at the heart of the impressive body of
nautical stories and novels of the "maritime frontier," inspired by
contemporaneous activity in the Pacific, the South Seas, and elsewhere
(175). As a coherent whole, the book does not impress Philbrick. It
fails, in part because Poe's own limited experience on the sea resulted
.in a narrative whose nautical materials are by turns copied, fudged, and
muddled. Worse, as a whole the novel is "warped" by Poe's apparent aim
"beyond the scope of realism" toward some "larger meaning.. . in symbolic
terms" that remains enigmatic and unachieved (175). Refusing to deal
with the text in this dimension, Philbrick invests his interest in the
Narrative as a compendium of forms of sea fiction: documentation and
vraisenblance, as in the work of Dana and of the authentic narratives: a
tone and diction of "piety," after the manner of Robinson Crusoe:
digressive exposition on seamanship, pioneered by Cooper in the
eighteen-twenties: and Gothic ronance, as in the work of Robert

Montgomery Bird .

Subversive Theories I: The Revolutionagy Mlse
None of the critics so far mentioned in this chapter identify

subversive or ironic elements in 33. They minimize the potential
threat Poe poses to their paradigms by suppressing those aspects of the
text which constitute its difference. A more sophisticated and

fruitful set of approaches to cultural theory have envisioned a dominant

196
American literary tradition in which subversion and irony are primary
impulses. In this vein, Poe is far more gracefully integrated.

Malville first suggested, in a review of "Mbsses from an Old
Manse," a predilection in American writers for a questing after truth,
and that the truth they sought took them to depths and extremities
beyond superficial reality. Because "in this world of lies, Truth is
forced to fly like a scared white doe," their work required a
willingness to superficially deceive,3 and to employ an obscure,
‘mystical symbology in their "prObings at the very axis of reality" and
"the secret workings of men's souls" (2164, 2165). Mbreover, he locates
these tendencies in the American heritage: "Certain it is, however,
that this great power of blackness... derives its force from its appeals
to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original sin" (2164).
He is writing of Hawthorne, of course, but‘Melville's other great
influence, Poe, whom ‘he never acknowledged, is a palpable presence, and
in reading the review one is struck by the fact that the qualities,
techniques, and effects attributed to "Masses" are equally pertinent to
Poe's fiction.

It would be almost a century before Melville's implications would
begin to unfold. D. H. Lawrence opened the way in 1923 with his
pathbreaking treatise Classics, in which he Observed that the great
American books both conceal and reveal the deepest truths of American
experience. Lawrence argued that these subversive impulses were
unconscious, the irony unintended. The»great American writers sought to
pronote a positive mythology of rebellion, revolution, and freedom: but
their books register anxiety and alienation. In denying their past and

their traditional cultural identity, Lawrence feels , Americans have-.. -'

197

squandered the opportunity the New World has provided western man to
revitalize his interrelationships with his social and natural
landscapes. In the characteristic American postures of rebellion,
flight, and racist violence, Lawrence sees a repression of the passional
self he calls the "blood conscious," denied by ideas that
reconceptualize hnman identity and relationships abstractly: denocracy,
reason, freedom, abstemious morality.

In what seems to be an answer to Lawrence, William Carlos Williams
wrote his own literary history, In‘the American Grain (1925), a
profoundly insightful book that has been underappreciated. His model,
too, is profoundly subversive, but consciously so, and to a more overtly
hopeful end. The imaginations of great Americans, literary and
historical, recognize that openness, receptivity, and originality
inevitably entail destruction and abandonment of old ideals,
particularly the repressive, values the Puritans imported. The
resulting vision--yet to be fully realized--is a rich, cross-fertile
field of multiple cultures, native and migrant, representing a profound
and new reconfiguration of intercultural relations.

Though indebted to Lawrence, Williamns' revision of his thesis is
crucial. For instance, Lawrence's Poe chapter is flawed by a mistake
uncharacteristic of him, if characteristic of his time: noting the
homicidal disintegrating capacities of the Poe narrator, by which, for
instance, Ligeia is killed by the hypertrophic, possessive will of the
narrator, Lawrence explicitly attributes the psychic disintegrity to Poe
himself, whom he calls a "fool" (73). While Poe's work, Lawrence
reasons, reveals the truth of the necessity of "disintegrating and

sloughing off the old consciousness [and] the forming of a new," it does

198

so negatively, for Poe felt only "the disintegrative vibration" (70).
Followed by Tate, Floyd Stovall, and James Gargano, Williams was the
first to correct this reduction, arguing that Poe was profoundly
conscious of his disintegrative tendency, and that it was part of a
positive mission. He placed Poe at the head of those responsible for a
new American idiom and culture.
The strong sense of a beginning in Poe is in mg else
before him. .. . On him is founded a literatureutypical: an
anger to sweep out the unoriginal, that became ill-tempered, a
monomaniacal driving to destroy, to annihilate the copied, the
slavish, the Else literature about him. . . He emerges as the
ghoulish, the driven back. (222-223)
While Poe's broomlike criticism gains most of Williams' attention, this
analogy of sweeping clean to clear the way for a "serious" literature
"of the soul" that is "not a matter of courtesy but of truth," applies
as the core mission of the entire body of Poe's writing (216, 221).
Others have built upon the notion that subversion was the primary
task, and irony the chief mode, of Poe's writing. In another
underappreciated but extremely insightful essay, "Poe and Tradition"
(1978), James Barbour isolates several strands of the American
intellectual climate in Poe's day that he targeted in his stories: the
popular notion of cannon sense in America, associated with Benjamin
Franklin and Andrew Jackson, for instance, and the British Empiricist
tradition that lay (in the distance) behind it: eighteenth—century
scientific rationalism: and American Transcendentalism. Joan Dayan, in
her landmark study of Poe, Fables of the Mind (1987), regards him as the

apotheosis of a national intellectual tradition of profound skepticism.

199

She observes that Poe derolishes one plank after another of the
structure of Americans' self—identity--common sense, reason, individual
identity. On one hand, she links him to Jonathan Edwards and the
Calvinist terror of eternal damnation, with Edwards' sense of man's
innate depravity and guilt, of his absolute alienation from God, and of
the absolute limitations of man's ability to know--in a world
secularized by Poe so that it is unrelieved by the Grace that mitigated
even Edwards' Calvinism. (m the other hand, she sees his work
reinterpreting Locke in contradicting speculative philosophy and, again,
emphasizing epistetological delimitation.
. A sophisticated and fruitful line of inquiry built upon the
Lawrence-Williams paradigm of a subversive literature understands _Pm to
exemplify what Donald Pease calls "the‘Revolutionary mythos" :at the-1
heart of nationalidentity: ‘Peasetsaprecursor in this is William“ " -‘
Spengemann, whose ‘AdventurouslMuse: The PoetiOs'Of American FictionI
1789-1900 (1977) offers an interpreta‘tionof 13m that is itself
revolutionary, a landmark in ‘1_>y_m_ critical history, but one curiously
neglected in Poe and 2m studies. The look itself also is
underappreciated, but will cone to “be regarded as a classic. It locates
the origin of the American Renaissance and a peculiar literary voice at
the point of convergence of New World travel writing and the arrival of
European Romanticism. The result is a "poetics of adventure," a
uniquely American permutation of Ronanticism.

In the Middle Ages revealed truth enounced from the center of the
known world, the Holy Land, determined identity and subordinated
experience, which must confirm or be discredited. Conversely, the

Romantic mind imagined that identity and truth itself might unfold from

200
individual eqnerience, even that of travel to the unknown, or at least
from the dialectic between old structures and the new experience. The
American Renaissance writers realized, argues Spengemann, "that the
world America was continually remaking must be seen not from the
unmoving center of the Old World, but from the places where the world
was being continually made new" (3) . In the New World travel writing,
even then a centuries-old tradition, they recognized the perfect vehicle
and metaphor of this process, as progressively westward moving explorers
and settlers experienced the diminishing capacity of Old World
ideologies to comprehend their situations. Thus, the Renaissance
writers were the first to formulate a literature in which
character-~both national and individual--could change in ways that might
be simultaneously unpredictable, nonprescriptive, and valid.

In Spengenann's scheme m is, as noted, "the first truly American
novel, " for successfully "reading back into travel-literature itself the
aesthetic creed that had sprung.. . from that historical. movement of
ideas it generated" (139). Pym himself is the ultimate traveller and
the absolute Rotantic. He revels in defiance of the "domestic wisdom of
the home," in his flight, in his wild choice of Peters for a companion,
and in embracing sensations and desires which are contrary to the
conventional wisdom of his elders in Nantucket. The narrative itself
careens, as episodes seem to arise out of no organic design, but
spontaneously, "as they seem to do on an actual voyage but cannot be
permitted to do in a narrative that aims to commicate the ultimate
meaning of that voyage" (147). But the narrative movement is away from,
not toward, any orderly view of the voyage or the world. Pym's sense of

an intelligible, rational world, by which he hopes to comprehend the

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increasingly alien geography and experience, is instead gradually
dismantled in the encounter, leaving him profoundly alone and
disoriented. Within the confines of this irrational world, knowledge,
so fervently sought by Pym, becomes equated with insanity: the
distinction between reality and projected fantasy becomes blurred and
ultimately irrelevant; and truth itself is "displaced" from the "orderly
public world of the narrator to the traveler's disordered mind, from
home to the nether reaches of the voyage, and from the meaning of
experience to experience itself" (146).

Of the entire body of domestic literary conventions Poe subverts to
achieve these effects, the outstanding one is his play with the point of
view, particularly in the dynamic between the "two" Pyms. Spengenann
documents the crucial shift-“within the text-from the returned
traveller's retrospective account, to the linear, present-tense
perspective of the traveller en route. Readers find themselves
gradually deprived of the reassuring, mediating voice of the former, and
therefore of any sense of narratorial or authorial design or
predetermined end. Thus, the reader comes to be as unsettled and
uncertain as the travelling Pym. He/she "does not stand on a fixed
point of reason and trace Pym's wanderings away from that point: he
moves with Pym through an increasingly irrational world toward the
greatest mystery of all, which remains unexplained" (141) .

Poe achieves these effects by a variety of narrative techniques so
innovative as to proffer an artistic persona as radical as his
protagonist's consciousness becomes. Spengemann argues that M's
formal "shortcomings" are inseparable from its overall contribution, in

the implication that "the only escape from domestic form and its

202
assumptions of an Objectively ordered world lay in a gothic
subjectivism so radical that it virtually disintegrated form altogether"
(150).

According to Spengemann, m suggests that "our true being, our
home, lies in an undiscovered country which we will create in the act of
going there: that the journey necessitates a radical, fatal change in
the traveler's mind or soul" (150). The ultimate contribution of EM!
therefore, is not in proffering a new cultural identity: rather, it
offers a paradigm for getting a new one, in the form of a sort of
allegory for at least the first part of the process.

I The difference between travel and revolution as definitive
principles of American culture is the difference between Spengemann's
and Pease's models: but it is not as profound a difference as the
imagery suggests, for they are two gestures of the same impulse:
and they are both tantalizing images for the Romantic imagination
seeking ways to establish the moral authority of individual
experience.

For Pease, the central dialectic opposition at work in early
American literary culture is sonething akin to R. W. B. Lewis' thesis of
the "parties" of "memory" and "hope," that is, Opposing impulses of
cultural continuity with past traditions and liberal impulses
encompassing the "Revolutionary mythos," negative freedom, and progress.
While the latter set succeeded during the drive for political
independence, it was bound to fail in the nineteenth century,
precipitating a crisis of identity. Dominant voices in early America
sought to negotiate this opposition in different ways within their own

writing, but what emerged overall, Pease offers, is a "cultural

203

compact," a mechanism for incorporating new experience, and therefore
change, within a cultural identity that nonetheless retains some degree
of continuity with the colonial/Old World past (for instance, in the
"haunting" past within the work of Irving, Hawthorne, and longfellow.)

Featuring the open frontier, initiation, Emersonian self-reliance
and self-fashioning, 2m seems on its face to be a perfect example of
this mechanism as it operated in adventure and travel fiction: the
traveller may present new experience, ideas, and a new self, for
addition "to the store of a culture's memory" (169), so long as it is
filtered through the reflective, mediating consciousness of the
repatriated traveller. On the contrary, Pease argues, m is in fact a
subversive masterpiece, a critique of the entire compact and the
self-deluding culture that authorizes it. Pym is a version of Poe's
dispossessed aristocrat and dispossessed soul, by which Poe expresses
the consequences for a culture that has broken from its identity: and
Poe's own experience of American life (or, from another angle, the
modern world), "as a terrifying loss--of place, past, lineage, and
position" (159).

m, then, is a parodic allegory. Pym displays neither memory nor
a sense of identity. The narrative itself is a series of displacenents
and erasures: of home, of characters, of narrative styles. Lacking a
reflective conscious, the prerequisite of memory, growth, and identity
itself, Pym has no means of assimilating new experience. In a rich
insight, Pease notices that Pym is so lacking as a conscious subject
that he cannot exist outside the objects of his experience, to reflect
on or represent them as objects: he can only identify with them, in

absolute subjection, for as long as they are present. The compact is

204
defunct; Pym has nothing to offer his culture, which is destined by a

parallel lack of memory to suffer the same fate of self-erasure.

flbvegye Theories II: The American Gothic Tradition

A second line of literary historiography emerged from the fertile
nexus of perceptions of Melville and Lawrence, discussed above, a
genealogy within which M has been more readily perceived than any
other. The first historian in recent decades to articulate an American
Gothic tradition as a powerfully subversive, skeptical mode is Harry
Levin, who introduced 2m into the discourse of American literary
history with his The Power of Blackness (1957). According to him, Poe
was one of three Renaissance figures who formulated an American
mythology of alienation, anxiety, and tragedy, and a poetic that would
inform the work of such later writers as James, Eliot, Hemingway,
Faulkner, and others . That poetic entailed the archetypal pattern of
the dislocated American, whose nervous, compulsive travels reveal the
dark side of freedam. Ironically, rather than outward-looking and
nation-building, this American psyche is introspective and anxious,
aware of itself as a lost soul, or at least of the tragic side of life.
Symbolistic and dreamlike, the books of this tradition pictorialize what
he calls the "American nightmare."

Building on the observations of Lawrence and Levin, later literary
historians would fill in the intellectual history. For example, in
studies of the Rm and Gothic traditions in America, Joel Porte
would argue that the peculiar features of their American forms owe to
the religious terror of the Calvinist theocratic culture of early

Colonial America: that the sense of alienation experienced by the

205
American hero that pervades the Gothic text resides in the general guilt
of the Fall; and that the travels of the Romantic hero are both an
expulsion and a flight from damnation. Drawing especially upon
Lawrence, Richard Slotkin would argue in his study of Native American
expropriation that perpetual, chain violence is both white America's
original sin and its punishment, in a land it has transformed from the
Garden to a "dark and bloody ground . "

Fiedler, Levin, and Joel Porte offer the mast searching
interpretations of 3m in this line. In fact, it has its own chapter as
a key support in each of their literary histories. For them, the
"probings into the axis of reality" in the American Renaissance took the
form of a symbolistic "night sea journey," to use John Barth's phrase, a
Jungian encounter with the irrational unconscious, both individual and
camunal. What most interests them in gm is a symbolism reduced to an
elemental , Chiaroscuro-l ike level--whi te/black: tomb/wombuheavi ly
charged with both psychological and social significance. This they see
as M's signal influence, evident for instance in Melville, Bierce, and
Faulkner.

Taking Melville's cue, Levin applies most pressure on Poe's
symbolic use of black, employed predominantly in the imagery of the
underground and of the night, and in heaviest allusion to The Inferno
and The Odyssey. He argues that Poe uses it to create a camplex,
inverted world, which Pym experiences as a sustained nightmare: 'Ihe
hero regresses to childlike passivity and to the mother's milk: blacks
are rulers, not slaves: 'civilized' whites revert to barbarity and
cannibalism. The South Pole is another of the weird and urmaturally lit

settings, like Weir or Auber, which betoken knowledge, but yield

206

mystery. It is there Pym is 'saved,' only to die, a graceless salvation
without enlightenment or redemption. M's inverted world thus exposes
the bestiality of human nature and man's alien, fallen state, repressed
beneath placid political and religious rationalizations to the contrary.
In his gym chapter, Fiedler leaps over Lawrence's comments on Poe,

to apply Lawrence's interpretation of other American fictionists.
Fiedler focuses upon the pathological flight of the archetypal American
hero from society and "adult heterosexual love" and the sublimation of
his passion into substitute emotions--principally the adoration of
nature and the ambivalent feelings of sentimentality and hatred toward
the non—white. M is both fulfillment and parody of this conventional
pattern. Fiedler notes the rich ambiguities of Peters as vicious "ogre"
and an intimate companion with homoerotic overtones: a "dusky fiend" and
Pym's gentle savior. Fiedler calls the erotically-charged cliffside
incident the climax of the novel, for it represents the culmination of
their "holy marriage":

my whole soul was pervaded with a lo_nging to fall: a desire,

a yearning, a passion utterly uncontrollable.... But now a

voice screamed within my ears: a dusky, fiendish and filmy

figure stood immediately beneath me; and, sighing, I sank down

'with a bursting heart, and plunged within its arms. (24.3)
But unlike other American writers, Poe reveals that this "marriage,"
like so much else Pym thinks he is sure of, is a sham: "The sought-for
embrace is a rape and a betrayal, a prelude to certain death"--a death,
moreover, without grace or rebirth (396).

Porte argues in The American Romance that American writers have

preferred the Romance to the novel for the richer possibilities it

207

offers for exposing the dark and duplicitous side of human nature. For
him, gm's nearest antecedent would be Paradise Lost, for the sense of
doam and guilt, "unexpiable and unremitting," that pursues Pym like a
demon in Poe's "theological fable." This presence is rooted in the fall
from innocence into adulthood and duality ("Religious Terror" 9). For
Porte, as for Lawrence, the key writers of American romance were, like
Milton, by no means innocent purveyors of an untainted American
paradise, and the archetypal American was less like Adam than Cain. Pym
is an American pilgrim whose wilderness journey is not an initiation
into "the sweet reasonableness" of a universe "ultimately explicable,"
but one that "stalk[s] the darkest aspects of the self and suggests how
fatal the American experience may ultimately prove to be" (Romance 85).
Others who have followed in this line have added little. In an
unnoticed discussion in her The Jougey Narrative in American Literature
(1978), Janis P. Stout describes m as a "night journey" full of
deception, confusion, and ambiguity. It carries him to a "new level of
consciousness, " but one based upon gained knowledge of "the destructive
and guilty darkness" of man's true nature. (93). Therefore, unlike
Odysseus's or Aeneas's quests, Pym's is neither "integrative or
restorative," and leaves him "alienated and frenzied" (95). Scott
Donaldson's unnoticed discussion, in his American Literature (1978),
argues that in m Poe undermines the ordinary perception of reality by
"ominous symbols" of purity or innocence that turn into horrifying
experience. Citing Tiger, the Tsalalians, and the "white menace" at the
Pole, Donaldson links these along with symbols in James' and Melville's
fiction to a deceptive symbolism of the American landscape, in which

inviting, virginal images turn menacing. The story as a whole

208

"underline[s] [Poe's] own nihilistic philosophy. Nothing is knowahle,
nothing is what it seems" (94). David Reynolds' taxonomic comments on
13m belong here as well. His analysis of the roots of American classics
in popular literature, Beneath the American Renaissance (1989),
discussed in chapter two, is the most detailed reconstruction of the
popular literature of Poe's time. He fleshes out, for instance, a
substantial body of subversive fiction he calls "Dark Adventure," to
which 13m belongs, along with work by George Lippard, William Gilmore
Simms , Robert Montgomery Bird, George Thompson, and others . Purveyors
of "a pornography of violence, " these writers "gave such primacy to
violence and irrationalism that the forces of darkness shattered those
of moral rectitude" (188, 191). His brief analysis of 3m and other
such texts reveal, if anything, that the former was rather typical, even

"tame" compared to same.

2

Social History

As Frank Lentricchia points out, "Literature makes samething
happen... . The literary is always the taking of position and
simultaneously the exercising of position with and upon the social
field" (S_OC_ia_l_ 156). In the mast concrete application of this
principle, several critics have approached Em from the standpoint of
its direct engagement with social and political issues of its day, in

studies that have found Poe to be either a cultural critic, or

conservative and complicit in practices upon which it comments.

Slavery and Racism

Among the most salient of social facts in the 1830's, in addition
to slavery itself, were the commencement of the Abolitionist movement's
full-scale assault on slavery, and the South's response. In the decade
that saw the appearance of William Loyd Garrison's The Liberator and
Theodore Weld's The Bible Against Slavery, the formation of the American
Antislavery Society, the upshifting of the Underground Railroad, and a
wide range of Northern state legislation assisting fugitives, the South
mobilized its cultural forces into a uniform voice in defense against
what it regarded as "an all-out offensive war," as one historian put it
(Franklin 254). Throughout the Southern publishing world, pamphlet and
book publishers, magazine editors, and writers of every discipline were
under intense pressure from some combination of law, personal
conviction, and above all public opinion to glorify Southern society and
its ideals, and to defend slavery. By the late 1830's, "a Southerner
had to think in certain grooves," as Samuel Eliot Morison put it:
simply, "slavery was no longer open to discussion" (265-266).

Of course the war-before-the-war was not only rhetorical . In "The
Militant South," John H. Franklin documents the extent to which the fear
of slave revolt pervaded the South. Insurrections in fact and rumor
occurred in every decade prior to the Civil War, but in response to the
apparently growing danger , with those of Demmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and
others in the 1820's and 1830's, Southern society became to a large
extent militarized, with state, local, and vigilante militias patrolling
the countryside . me Southern pamphlet writer represented the general

hysteria: the blacks "should be watched with an eye of steady and

210
unremitted observation. . . . They are the JACOBINS of the country, the
COMMON ENEMY OF CIVILI'ZED SOCIETY, and the BARBARIANS WHO WOULD, IF THEY
COULD, BECOME THE DESTROYERS OF OUR RACE" (qtd. in Franklin 252).

Numerous _Pym commentators have taken the Tsalalian episode to be an
allegorical statement on this situation; a few have made it a major part
of their interpretation, generally seeing it as, for instance, an
apocryphal warning of the nightmare scenario of slave revolt. It is a
substantial part of Ievin's, Hoffman's, Fiedler's, Rosensweig's, and
Sutherland's arguments; for Sydney Kaplan it is the key itself: PM is
a political tract in the form of a fantastic "allegory of race" (162).
It dramatizes the belief that in a world where blacks rule, primitive
ignorance obtains. Worse, these primitives, who display the exaggerated
features of stereotype, prove sinister, luring the white Jane G_uy crew
with gestures of hospitality into their deadly landslide.

But Kaplan argues that Poe himself is cunning, subtly reinforcing
his racist fable with expanding frames of reference that invoke the main
pillar of the proslavery defense, theology. Encoded in the white-black
interaction established on Tsalal is the American master-slave
relationship. (Poe signals us by Pym's description of his first sight
of the island, which has rock ledges resembling "corded bales of cotton"
[17.101.) But subsuming this representation is a series of references to
Old Testament prophetic history, in the configuration of the
Chosen-cursed contrast. An array of peoples traditionally regarded as
descendants of Ham or otherwise cursed are invoked in the Tsalalian
episode by allusion, landscape imagery, and especially the linguistic
materials Poe introduces, in the petroglyphs and the gorge "writing":

Egyptian, Ethiopian/Cushite, Arabic, Babylonian, and the ancient heathen

211
of Arabia Petra. To make sure it is not too subtle, the "author" of the
Note identifies some of these by his translations. The most damning
association of all is in the fact that the Tsalalians themselves speak a
kind of pidgin Hebrew, and therefore would seem to be a degenerate,
cursed remnant of the Chosen .4

Finally, beyond this philological material is the heaven-hell
dichotomy, from which angle Tsalal is populated by demons and flowing
with its own blood-like River Styx. Pym's final encounter with the
"comforting white" figure, in Kaplan's words, is God himself, a
repetition of the image of "The Ancient of Days" Daniel sees, whose
garment and hair are "white as snow" (Daniel 7:9). It is he who has
engraved "within the hills" "vengeance" against blacks (Note.9) ,
implicitly authorizing their destruction (on Tsalal) and slavery (in
America).

Those who have seriously taken up Kaplan's implications respect the
linguistic and symbolic associatiOns he uncovered. But there are
fundamental questions he implicitly raises only to ignore. Kaplan
apparently feels Poe left the crime and guilt that lay behind the
Tsalalians' curse unexplored: Kaplan himself certainly does. Moreover,
are the hero and the other whites totally innocent in a narrative rife
with guilt associations? In other words, would a writer whose works are
as morally complex and ambiguous as Poe's take the time to write a long
narrative that is no more sophisticated than a propagandistic,
one-dimensional condemnation of a race? Finally, what about the moral
implications for Kaplan's unmitigated, race-hating Poe? Subsequent
critics in this vein go further in developing thematic and moral

implications of Poe's engagement with slavery in m, and elsewhere, but

212
by no means are they in accord.

It has been well-established that Poe regarded himself as a
Southerner throughout his career, in his fidelity to Southern
aristocratic values and his conservative (southern Whig) political
views.5 His views on slavery itself have been a subject of controversy
for sme time, however, complicated by the questionable authorship of a
review long thought to be his one clear statement in support of slavery
(as opposed to a multitude of attacks on "ranting" abolitionists.) The
review appeared unsigned in 1836 in The Southern Literary Messenge_r_
during Poe's tenure as assistant editor. It examines sympathetically
two proslavery polemics, James K. Paulding's §_lavery in the Unit_ed
_St_a_i_:g§_ and (William Drayton's?) The South Vi_n_Ldicated fromlf'rreagnfl
Fanaticism of Northern Abolition. Poe's authorship of the review was
not questioned until 1941, when William D. Hull argued in his
dissertation that Beverly Tucker was the author. In 1972 Rosenthal
assembled data ruling out Tucker as a candidate, but went on to argue
that Poe's authorship is not decisively material, for all the proslavery
sentiments he expressed elsewhere . However; examination of the reviews
he cites invariably reveal ambiguity, for in every case Poe's staterents
are directed elsewhere, and the opinion on slavery must be inferred.6
A number of influential Poe scholars remain unconvinced of Hull's
conclusions. For example, Patrick Quinn without coment omitted the
review from his collection of Poe's reviews; and G. R. Thompson
maintains Hull's thesis, as he argues that Poe, a "true man of letters,"
transcended his locale: "Rarely does he employ Southern locales or
character types: he does not embroil himself in the issue of slavery: he

does not address matters of Southern autonomy and separatism" (27‘7 ) .

213

John Carlos Rowe has taken up Rosenthal's torch, and has taken to
task the whole of Poe criticism in his recent revisionist essay "Poe,
Antebellum Slavery, and Mbdern Criticism." He admonishes, on one hand,
traditional Americanist Poe specialists who historicize him, but
downplay his implication in Southern racist ideology: and on the other,
modernist and deconstructionist readers who see in Poe a protomodernist,
and simply lift him out of his social context, and so implicitly
exonerate‘him.

In his own reading of m he attempts to expose the folds of Poe's
racism. The text is Poe's defense against his own "repressed fears
regarding slave rebellions in the South and‘his deeper fear that
Southern aristocratic life itself'mdght be passing" (127). He counters
these by encoding within gym a sort of "white poetic," in which language
and reason, mastered by white, civilized man, arable mans of
appropriate power over darkness: "As the 'enlightened ruler' of
language, its rational governor, the poet works to recontain that
savageryuthe mob, the black, the lunatic—within poetic form" (127).

Building on Jehn Irwin's model of representation in Eng, the
inversion that writing is the referent of reality, Rowe argues that
physical bodies and the action itself are "psydhosymbolic."
Specifically, what is recurrently symbolized is the "poetic enactmen "
of Pym and the text itself, as poet/poem, acquiring mastery (129). One
of the two examples he elaborates, the cannibal scene, flows out of the
mutiny, which he argues is a metaphor of the Nat Turner Rebellion of
1831. 7 Pym's cannibalism of Parker reverses this valence, for Parker,
Rowe reasons, may have reference to a "James W: Parker," one of six

judges who signed Turner's execution order. The act, then, is a

214
symbolic "Eternalization of white power": "The poet transforms the
threatened body of the White Master into the rhetoric of the white
Poet. . . . Pym is invested with the power of the law, now transposed into
the fictional frame" (129-30). One symbolic enactment of this power is
in the narrative's disposal of Peters, a conflation of the Indian and
the Black: for his good service against savagery, and for Pym, his
"white slave master," Peters is granted his "just deserts," residence in
the free state of Illinois.

Throughout his article, Rowe repeatedly calls for a "reassessment"
of Poe in light of his proslavery views. He does not suggest what the
new stance might be, but he gives some hints by couching his discussion
in a tone of moral outrage that calls to mind the banishment of
Heidegger and de ban (the latter invoked by name). Acknowledging the
uncertainty of Poe's authorship of the Paulding-Drayton review, he
argues that it is all but irrelevant, for it and other proslavery
materials were published in the Messenger during his tenure, and
appeared alongside his own writings: "we must acknowledge that the
'association' of ptm1ication in the same newspaper or journal can be the
basis for a substantial case" (119).

Without trying to solve the question of Poe's racism, we can
nonetheless briefly point out the selectivity in Rowe's
re-historicization. Among eletents of the social and biographical
context Rowe ignores are the homogeneity of values, especially regarding
slavery, in the South during that period, and the deterioration of
intellectual freedom. Relevant also is the degree of control Poe as
assistant to Thoras White exerted in selecting the materials, in a

journal whose stated mission was the advancement of Southern letters

215
(Beaver 262). Of course even these discriminations are unimportant if we
wish to assign blame by association. Poe could have quit on this score;
he could have joined the abolition movement, along with Thoreau,
Whittier, and Lowell, and even moved to New England. But Poe was not
only associating with Southerners, he was a Southerner; and he was not
merely living in his environment, he was a product of it. As such, and
given the heated intellectual climate of the 1830's, what stands out
about Poe's writing with respect to slavery is the extent to whidh.he
chose to, and was able to, avoid direct engagement with the
subject-—despite his thousands of pages of writing upon all subjects of
the day. Almost every comment that relates reflects more upon his
literary views: his condemnation of didacticism in the writings of
abolitionist poets; his sense of insult at being dismissed by
Nbrtherners:merely because he was a Southerner. If we then question
why, as a Southerner, he refrained from explicit, audible support for
slavery and for Southern positions in Nerth-South political debate, we
must consider the fact that he disdained practical politics throughout
his life, and the fact that so far as we know he had no direct, personal
involvement with slaves as a child or an adult.

Finally, regarding Poe's lack of dissent, we must ask whether the
fact that he was ahead of his time and place in some respects creates an
unwarranted expectation that he be advanced in all respects. A.man.who
could accept phrenology and several other pseudosciences that were
already then discredited might be more credibly expected to accept the
racialist science of the day whidh supported white supremacy.

Several critics in this vein find within the mix of Poe's attitudes

towards race, slavery, and the South incipient criticism of Southern

216
attitudes and institutions, since, as G. R. Thompson opines, for Poe to
address a subject was to deal with it "with duplicity or irony" (102';
Fiction 9) . In his wide-ranging, scholarly introduction to a 1975
edition to m, Harold Beaver corroborates and extends Kaplan's work in
reconstructing the historical context and the race/slave significance
within the text.

However Kaplan, he argues, has missed the irony. This intricate
tapestry of white-black polarities, ancient languages, cursed race
associations, and strange taboos and rites is itself a kind of
cryptogram or hieroglyph, masking a deeper layer of significance: "This
Narrative as a whole--if it really is a whole-—cries out for
decipherment" (270).

The key is Peters, an Indian-white "halfbreed" with a negroid
appearance, by Pym's own description, who both symbolizes and prefigures
Pym's own psychic integration. Pascal Oovici, Jr., in his 1968 "Toward
a Reading of Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon M. ," was thefirst to
develop the symbolic significance of Peters, as a social mediator
between savage and civilized society, and mentally, between rational and
irrational poles within Pym's psyche.

Beaver documents the progressive psychic disintegration over the
course of the Narrative, with individuals and races as terms for the
psyche. Against this, Peters emerges as a powerful, mediating force.

As a "dark hybrid" he is able to save Pym by his own deadly violence.
"In issues of life and death, [he] is the middle or composite term...
part cannibal, part friend, half lover, half fiend: a compound of

darkest Petra and St. Peter that is a rock for Pym's salvation" (272).

The salvation for which Peters preserves Pym occurs with the

217

transcendent experience at the Pole, "total, integrated experience,
reborn to life-in-death" (273). Beaver's ingenious reading adumbrates a
vision of social and racial integration that mediates, symbolizes, and
emerges from psychic integration.

Coming to Em from the fresh angle of her revisionary reading of
constructions of race in American literature, Dana Nelson offers an
interpretation of startling originality and insight, and one which must
be reckoned a landmark in the long quest to grasp just what Poe is
driving at in gym. The Wbrld in Black and White: Reading "Race" g3
American Literatug, 1638-1867 (1992) decodes what Beaver and a few
others were groping toward, a profound satirical critique of American
imperialism and ethnocentrism.

She concentrates on the Tsalal episode as the site of an incipient
colonial enterprise, with associations to every field of American
involvement--the American West, the African slave trade, and, of course,
the South Pacific (98). She shows how Poe exposes the desire for
domination and exploitation that typically lay behind the seemingly
innocent commerce Captain Guy proposes. The token trade of trinkets for
supplies is a prelude to full-scale commercial exploitation (of the
biche de mer mollusk), and a cover for the real dynamic of force: "We
established a regular market on shore, just under the gggg of the
sdhooner, where our barterings were carried on with evegy appearance of
good faith" (20.1, italics supplied).

But Poe's exposé goes deeper. Disentangling the composite
scientific, commercial, and military strands of the colonial process,
Nelson systematically detonstrates how Poe's putatively racist,

colonialist text "collapses on its own structure of racial knowledge"

218
(92). She exposes the complicity between the desire for domination and
the quest for knowledge, embodied in scientific enterprise of several
kinds, and represented in the text by Pym's ostensibly disinterested
record of his geographical and biological Observations. Pym's record,
like that of other explorers, will "map white access" into new regions,
and "inform the public on materials and lands" available for
exploitation (293). Moreover, the findings themselves, in a multitude
of ways that carry Nelson to odd, neglected corners of the text, seem to
encourage and justify such action. For example, the peculiar
polarization of colors, the bifurcation of substances (such as the
veined water), and the behavior of the wildlife around Tsalal, all
reinforce a hierardhical "apartheid of nature," which.combines with his
Observations of the "degenerate" natives to "document a 'natural' basis
for white domination" (293).

Nelson then turns her attention to the ways in which Poe undermines
colonial knowledge and sense of identity. Oblonial identity is defined
in the process of dispossession, the act itself an "interpretive will"
inseparable from colonial interest. Its collapse is revealed in a
series of ironies that expose the progressive failure of Pym's cognitive
strategies. Thus, determined to see the Tsalalians as ignorant and
treacherous, Pym and the other whites in "willful blindness" miss
evidence of considerable sophistication, and bring about their own
destruction by'(treaCherously) provoking the Tsalalians. Again, Pym
inadvertently reveals that race is an interpretive political construct
rather than a biological category, when his identification of Peters‘ by
race changes according to what will conform to his colonial rhetoric.

And finally, he is Oblivious to the deeper significance of the rookery

219
of Kerguelen's Island, despite a six-paragraph description. What he
misses is the potential human application of an integrated social
system, an encoded alternative model for American society and
international cooperation, in which the albatross, penguins, and
welcomed individuals of other species cooperate and contribute equally,
each "enjoying all the privileges of citizenship" (14.18).

In some brief remarks about gym in her article "Romance and Race,"
in The Columbia History of the Mican Novel, Joan Dayan interprets the
Tsalalian episode along the same lines as Nelson, but like Kaplan and
Beaver, understands it to be more sharply focused upon racism in the
American South. Thus, she associates the pseudobiblical "vengeance"
quote at the end of gym with a looming "catastrophe" to be visited upon

the South for "the offence of slavery" (109).

Society and Econgiy.
Five studies try to articulate a social economic critique in Em,

with limited success. In "Poe's 2m and the American Social
Imagination" (1975), Eric Mottram begins with the potentially rich
insight that the principle dynamic in m (and throughout Poe's work) is
the tension between "the myth of the free individual and the fact of
social enclosure" (28), played out in plots featuring dominance and
submission, control and resistance. Social enclosure offers rational
stability, but stimulates claustrophobia; free individuality answered
Poe's liberalism in this respect, but leaves the individual vulnerable
to "uncontrollable psychic, elemental, sexual and social forces" (28).
He sees Pym's departure from Nantucket as a rebellion against the stable

order of middle class values as mirrored in his commercially prosperous

220
family and the Nantucket whaling industry, values which become tested
and exposed in the extreme conditions of the journey. For instance, the
cannibal/sacrif ice scene can be seen as both an outgrowth and a metaphor
of the predation at the root of a consumer society, "or any system in
which sole men are cannibalized for political, religious, 'or economic
purposes" (40). Unfortunately, the distillation of Mottram's analysis
leaves a great deal of residue for a drop of substance. Any final
statement is lost in cryptic, unconnected psychological, political,
biographical, and sexual interpretive contents, and a welter of factual
, nautical events from the time that serve no purpose beyond anecdote,
unless a smokescreen of ink to conceal the disintegration of Mottram's
own narrative.

In a reading similar to Mottram's, Scott Bradfield gives his own
interpretation of m as a political tract which registers Poe's strong
anti-revolutionary views. In the gm chapter of Dreaming Revolution:
Tr_ansgression in the Deveflent of the Algerian Rm (1.993),
Bradfield argues that EH! is a touchstone of reaction against bourgeouis
revolution in each of its various overlapping phases relevant in Poe's
day: class conflict, sectional conflict, abolition, and democracy
itself. In each episode, gym features revolution of some kind,
which results in social chaos and unchecked violence, and advances Pym
further down the road of personal disaster: Pym's flight from the
orderly, bourgeous world of New England, the m mutiny, and the
Tsalalian uprising. As Pym progresses further from civilization, the
orderly, rational arrangetent of human relations is increasingly seen to
be a veneer thinly concealing the savage, irrational quality of human

nature. By fooling the reader along with Pym, Poe demonstrates how

221

easily we can be fooled by idealistic notions about human nature. At
stake is good government, imperial expansion, and society itself.
Bradfield's analysis is slight in length and quality, and while his
conclusions are plausible, they could be more solidly argued if Poe and
13m criticism were part of his context.

Larzer Ziff's half-chapter on m in his Literagy Democragy (198.1.)
and G. K. watkins' God and Circumstances (1989) are no better, and are
similarly compromised by an apparent lack of awareness of recent gm
criticism. Ziff's has been unnoticed by bibliographers, but they haven't
missed mmCh. He regards the narrative as typically subversive of
provincial and conventional attitudes: Both Pym in his rebellious
posture, and 2m itself are an assault on "the venerable assertion of
comon sense and comon profit" (84) . Like Thoreau, Pym embarks on a
voyage in protest and rejection of the conventional; and like Thoreau,
he turns in his rebellion to pure sensuousness. Pym, especially,
abandons will altogether, in "a quest for being through sensation" (86).
But provocative as it is, the conjunction with Thoreau is fruitless for
its lack of development. Watkins, in a brief book on m and Twain's
The Great Dark, gives an occluded reading that is defeated by its texts.
He juxtaposes the two books on the basis of their common project: Like
Twain's text, Egg has been.misunderstood, for it communicates not
pessimism but an "intensely life—affirming" message. Eadh counters a
"soul-numbing overreliance on reason alone," and the "deterministic
doom" of technological and social progress that was threatening to
constrict American society in both halves of the nineteenth century (2);
eadh also uses a white symbology of transcendence, by means of personal

moral development, beyond "man-made chaos to spiritual order" (111) .

222

Finally, Alexander Hammond has recently contributed a brief, rather
inconclusive essay, "Consumption, Exchange, and the Literary
Marketplace: From the Folio Club Tales to Bug" (1992). In it he
attempts to extend to PM Michael Gilmore's thesis that the writers of
the American Renaissance were deeply divided individually between
commercial appeal to the new mass market (and so risking dependency) and
an ideal of autonomy and truth-telling that might entail condemning that
public. He regards the shift in mid-composition of BL“ from a
relatively elite market (at the Messenger) to a mass market (with
Harpers) as a self-conscious condescension and surrender of control
which Poe recorded in the text in the form of food consumption as a
series of tropes for literary consumption. The most conspicuous of

these is the cannibalism, a trope "emphasiz[ing] the cannibalism of the

authorial self" (165).

3

Intellectual History: International Romanticism

An important juncture in the legitimation of Poe for American
criticism is the point at which scholars, in the nineteen-sixties and
-seventies, finally began to position him in the Western intellectual
tradition. Beyond theories of national unity and the American
Renaissance, he has been linked seriously to Cartesianism (Stanley
Cavell, "Being Odd, Getting Even,“1984), the Empirical tradition (Joan
Dayan, Eagles of the m, 1987), German Idealism (G. R. Thompson, 1035
Fiction, 1973: Evan Carton The Rhetoric of Fiction, 1985; John Limon,
The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science, 1990), Bristentialism
(William Peden, 1972), Phenomenology (George Poulet Studies in Hman
1mg, 1956; trans. 1956: David Halliburton, Edgr Allan _Po_e_, 1973), and
versions of literary Modernism (T. S. Eliot, "From Poe to Valéry," 1948,
John Carlos Rowe, Mmh the Custom House, 1982; etc.). But the most
complex linkage has been the attempts to find Poe's place within sole
definition of philosophic or aesthetic Romanticism. As late as this
development was begun, it seems clear now that Poe needs the widest
possible historical frame. One can argue that he takes Romanticism well
beyond other American Renaissance writers in key respects, and one must
turn to Europe to map the coordinates that orient Poe's Romanticism. In
this task he has been blessed with distinguished and persuasive voices.
Edmund Wilson was the pioneer, with his 1926 "Poe at Home and Abroad";

but Edward Davidson's 1952 Poe: A Critical Study is by far the most
223

224

important document in this area, doing the invaluable work Matthiessen
left undone in establishing Poe's deep roots in European Romanticism.
Thompson charted the extensive influence of Germany, (Poe's Fiction).
Floyd Stovall ("Poe's Debt to Coleridge," 1969) and Glenn Omans
("Intellect, Taste, and the Moral Sense: Poe's Debt to Immanuel Kant,"
1980) contributed intensive analyses of particular influence, while Leon
Chai in The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissan_ce (1987), has
provided a deep and wide-ranging study linking Poe and other Americans
to Romanticism and its roots in the European Renaissance. John Limon's
The Place of Fiction (1990) studies early American writers within the
context of Western developments in science and epistemology.

me of the characteristics of 2m with which many critics of all
kinds agree is in the solipsistic focus of the narrative on Pym as
individual subject, in a degree of concentration perhaps matched in the
nineteenth century only by James . Among the concerns of Romanticin,
possibly none is more germaine than the individual, the ontological
center of the Rorantic universe.8

But that statelent needs a context . Northrop Frye sees Romanticism
in the broadest possible terms as the first major shift in the Western
tradition, whose biblical mythology projected God as separate from the
world, and human consciousness as distinct from nature. An imaginative
revolution stretching back to the Renaissance and ahead to Modernism has
resulted in the withdrawal of these projections. If God is in rather
than above nature, then nature, not society, is the direction in which
to seek truth: and if human nature has only sought to separate itself

from nature, rather than being intrinsically distinct, then intuition of

the individual subject takes epistomological priority over reason,

225

individual or accumulated. Imagination becomes not just a source of
beauty, but of truth, a gnosis by which connection to the divine in
nature is mysteriously intuited and communicated aesthetically. Poetry
reclaims the sacred function it had in precivilized society: through
the poem, or in direct reflection upon nature, the individual
imagination of the poet and the reader effects a "reunion," broken by
hmmankind's 'Fall' into reason--the result of which is particularity,
division, and alienation-~from God, nature, and each other.

Romantic poetry and the romantic quest in the broadest sense can be
seen as an attempt to visualize reintegration, while forms of negative
Rmanticism, such as Gothic, focus upon the isolated condition of fallen
humankind. Both categories grapple with the fundamental dilemma Kant
articulated: the poet's persona and the romancer's questing hero are
seeking a transcendent truth in the sensual world: the noumenal must be
conceptualized by the very categories of perception we wish to
transcend, such as reason.

Poe, of course, as Paul John Eakin has shown, was obsessed with
this problem, and 2m dramatizes this gap in an almost conspicuous way:
In the formula of Mario Praz's "exotic romanticism," Pym everywhere
seeks out and crosses margins and thresholds, both in physical and
mental/sensory terms (200-201): he sails beyond the geographic margin of
the world, to a point at which language fails and consciousness itself
dissolves: he returns with portentuous, mysterious writing; he
experiences a sublime vision of a seemingly supernatural form, and
disappears into the seascape over which it presides: and he occupies the
gap between life and death, surviving yet not surviving this mystical

experience-yet the writing, the divine figure, and Pym himself remain

226
silent: any ultimate knowledge, transfiguration, or unification with the
divine on the part of Pym mmst be speculative, for no clear evidence is
offered. A chief discrimination among those who have read 2m in
Romantic terms, in addition to varying foci, is how they handle this

obstacle to Pym's quest of the soul.

Hoary Readings

Davidson finds coherence throughout the body of Poe's work in the
influence of Coleridgian metaphysics and aesthetics, offering pioneering
studies of E_ur_e_k§_ and other texts in addition to Em. Poe's work is
structured upon the neoplatonic world model which held the multiform
material world to be shadow and expression of a supernatural, unitary
principle. This "organicism" informed the theory of symbol and language
with which he worked: the ineffable idea or thing is immanent in the
symbol: the words and structures are expressions of the poet's
imagination. m is an odyssey of an "eterging consciousness," in which
Pym's consciousness is manifest not in intellection or reflection, as in
a typical Bildunggrotan, but in his actions and the world imagined:
"This self-as-imagination begins with the real, substantial world....
Poe steadily defines and sharpens the point of perception until all else
fades before the intensity with which a Pym—self regards the world and
itself" (160). Like the poet's, Pym's quest for "self—knowledge" is an
imaginative enactment. His words are "a progress of the mind and the
imagination toward understanding. Words can create another reality,
neither the mind's nor the thing's" (175). The odyssey entails a
progressive reduction of world and self: Incidents of deception and

illusion undercut his confidence both in rational perception and in the

227
material world itself : he experiences uprooting, and loss of identity;
his self-destructive tendencies move him toward death. The movement of
the Narrative as a whole is toward material annihilation as a
prerequisite for transcendent revelation: "The search for the self is
the loss of the self: the quest is the annihilation" (177). Pym's
transcendence is adumbrated in the recurrent images of rebirth and in
the shrouded figure, characterized by mystery, supernatural aura, and
whiteness. However Davidson concedes that the quest "ended in mystery, "
for while he would seem to have merged with "the unitary principle,"
that term finally retains meaningless, for unlike other romantic heroes,
he crossed beyond the point at which language could report his vision,
"never to return" (175). Like Eakin, though, Davidson feels Poe, at
least until age—kg, was more interested in dramatizing a process rather
than attetpting to communicate ultimate spiritual truth.

A number of subsequent visionary/transcendental readings do not
deviate far from Davidson's outlines. Curtis Fukuchi's "Poe's
Providential Mmtive of Arthur Gordon Pym" (1986), documents Pym's
progressive recognition of providential intelligence implicit in the
world as he travels through it, and the purification of his motivation,
from materialistic and self-centered to spiritual and redemptive.
Interestingly, Ted Billy also sees Providence as the dominant force in
periodically rescuing Pym, in his "Providence and Chaos in The Narrative
of Arthur Gordon Em" (1989).

Douglas Robinson in American Manges (1985) , regards "tre
uncertainty of -‘ interpretation" as the "rhetorical focus" of the text,
represented in the elision of Pym's transcendental experience, leaving a

"gap" between the visible world and transcendental realm adumbrated at

228
the Pole. What Poe gives us in place of a verbal description, R9919§9Q_
argues, is the final image formed by the merging of Pym, rushed into the
gap, with the white figure. The image does not close the gap, but it
"permit[s] a visionary habitation" of it: in other words, it does not
resolve the uncertainty, but constitutes an "interpretive embodiment, an
act of mediation that links the here and the beyond by containing them
in a single image" (119, 120). Todd Lieber's Eyg Chapter in his Endless
Expgriments (1973) emphasizes the power of the individual imagination,
once it is liberated from the constrictions of external reality and
verisimilar representation, to create its own total, subjective world.
The narrative ends with "the final movement into pure selfhood, in which
the hero is 'saved' from destruction by the redeeming power of the
imagination" (188).

Richard Wilbur, in his introduction to a 1973 edition, interprets
the Narrative as a document of transcendence, with reflexive reference
to both individual psychology and cosmology. Pym proceeds to redenption
through gnosis, or knowledge transcending senses, reason, or learning,
by way of a purifying engagement with evil, on Tsalal and in his cwn
body. Reality on the material plane is cast off, and he is reborn. The
shrouded figure is an image of Pym's new status, symbolizing "the coming
reunion of the voyager's soul with God or--what is the same thing-awith
the divinity in himself" (xxiv). Julian Symonds' reading of M in his
1978 biography The Tell-Tale Heart is confused and indecisive, but at
one point he comes to a conclusion similar to Davidson's and Wilbur's:
PE "is a vision, one might say, of the eventual state foreseen in
_Eu_r_'_e1_ca_, when man has become the Godhead" (219).

Kent Ljunquist unfolds in a series of it‘ his interpretation of

229
m as a visionary text, one which evokes the sublime by exploiting
the Romantic Titanism Poe absorbed chiefly from Jacob Bryant's
Antient wholggy (1807) . A general theme recurring throughout
Bryant, one that apparently had some currency, is the eccentric
conflation of Greek mythology and Old Testament prophesy in probing
prehistory. Bryant ties the Titans, originally a race of giants, but
cursed and dispersed following their defeat by Zeus, with the biblical
cursed and ignoble peoples, inspiring in gym both the great, shrouded
figure and the Tsalalians. The Tsalal and polar scenes together,
then, constitute "Pym's sublime vision [that] penetrates the mists of
time in... one appalling image, the sway of history from man's
origins in harmony to his degeneration into savagery" (951ml 67).
In his encounter with the shrouded, white figure, a pristine Titan,
Pym receives his transcendent "vision of the angelic world" ("Descent"
89).

David Halliburton's reading of m, in figar flan Poe: A
Phenomenolggical Study (1973), envisions both a quasi-mystical union
of author and reader in the act of reading, and a transcendent
experience for Pym in the narrative's conclusion. He focusses
largely upon Poe's techniques for replicating for the reader Pym's
immediate sensations. His method is based on a rather mystical
version of George Poulet's pure subjectivist model of reading.

Poulet opposed to the traditional analytic-objectivist model the idea
that the book exists as a sort of mimesis of the author's
consciousness. He postulated that the reader reconstitutes the
subjective "I" in his or her own consciousness, effectively becomning

the subject, and so experiencing unmediated sensation.

230

Halliburton fleshes out the patterns that energe from the series of
effects and sensation. Pym "systematically" displaces himself into
"perfect" isolation, leaving hometown, family, and friends. He
experiences the terrors of circumscription of lateral space by an
"infinity of walls," forcing him in a series of upright but immobile
postures (261). Interwoven is a graded series of falls from this
posture, accompanied by inhumations. His perverse longing to fall, such
as at the cliffsidem-the "urge to risk all" and become "absolute
victim"--functions as a desire for the ontological condition for
salvation. The epicycles of descent and deliverance point to ultimate
redemption, prefigured in his sensation after having survived the cliff
descent: "I felt a new being" (23B.4).

Rather late in the essay, we find that Halliburton somewhat
surprisingly has switched terms, from a phenomenological/psychological
orientation to that of mythicized initiation: Pym inflates to heroic
symnbolism. Following his ordeals, "the victorious hero acquires a new
mode of being" (273). His final descent into the polar chasm, in a
quasi-supernatural "region of novelty and wonder" (Collected 24.4),
occurs amidst verbs and images of rising and ascent, and represents

Poe's attempt "to render pure transcendence" (278) .

Romantic Nature Phi losgphy
A Ronanticist reading alternative to the visionary/gnostic is "Poe,

2m, and Primitivism" (1973), by John T'eunissen and Evelyn Hinz. It
does not negate Hinz's earlier essay on gm as a Menippean satire, but
goes farther to suggest that it offers a primitivist message. The

philosophic stance and satiric tone they feel predominates would seem to

231

link it less to Romantic literature than to Voltaire's Candide and
Rousseau's Social Contract, though they do not make the link. It is a
blistering parody of social institutions, particularly exposing the
"exhaustian of Christian symbolism" and the inefficacy of Christian
ethics. And as they read it, it certainly does seem more closely linked
in form to Enlightenment satiric narrative literature. However, while
Candide finds South American natives to be as innately corrupt and
depraved as Europeans, Poe subtley idealizes his primitives as an
innocent, vital, and superior culture. Thus Poe would seem to emnlate
Rousseau precisely as other Romantics did, idealizing nature as perfect
and establishing the natural man as closest to perfection.

Teunissen and Hinz identify the halves of the Narrative as two
stages of satire: the recognition of "cultural failure," during the
A_r_i_el and Grams episodes, and the atavistic "experience of a primitive
culture," and thus the materials for a new "symbolic idiom" (19). Mast
of the article is devoted to explicating the Christian parody-—Pym's
"doggerel" references to Providence in tight spots, while never
crediting God with deliverance: the ironic appearances of Providence
only after tragedy has struck: Pym's prayer in the hold, which becmes
effectively a prayer to a dog, not to God: and several parodic
mcharists. They also expose the hypocrisy of the alazonic Pym, who
pretends to represent Christian values, in his innocent love of dog and
friend, and his opposition to the mutiny and the cannibalism. Yet he
easily capitulates to circumstances, for instance giving over to
cannibalism when the support of others he had "calculated" fails to
materialize-and though he himself is far from starvation. The authors

are not nearly so specific about supporting their claimns for the

232
Tsalalians' "cultural, genuinely religious, superiority" (19), claiming
that the ending "has symbolically explained itself":
Poe and the responsive reader become the true ascoverers and
.ggcoverers of the primitive values by way of an imaginative
journey past northern consciousness and its outworn symbolism
into the "south" of the ggg; where the pure arChetypes
manifest thereelves in a commanding symbolism (19-20).

Though Jehn Limon uses very different historical coordinates, and
seems a great deal more aware of the intellectual context, his reading
philosophically resembles Teunissen and Hinz'. The Place of Fiction gg
theyTime of Science (1990) offers a detailed, informed argument that
Brown, Hawthorne, and Poe were American exponents of the concurrent
German Natu_rphilosophie, a later movenent in German idealism that sought
to "appropriate" scientific findings into a metaphysical model (212).9
Building upon earlier claims of Kant, Roussea, and Goethe, who variously
postulated in some respect divine inmanence in nature, the
Natugphilosophs found in nascent cell and germ theory and other
scientific developments evidence of the omnipresence of life, energy,
and creative growth in nature, and reflection and action of a divine
telos. Repudiating the Newtonian/Cartesian.medhanistic'model of nature,
and reversing the laws of thermodynamics, Hegel argued that nature's
thrust was not toward entropy and diffusion, but toward order and unity:
its "purpose" is to "extinguiSh itself, and to break through its rind of
immediate and sensuous being... to emerge rejuvenated as Spirit"
(Philosophy of Nature 3:12: qtd. in,Limon‘glggg,90). Thus, as Schelling

put it, nature is "visible spirit" and spirit is "invisible Nature"

(Ideas Toward a Philosophy of Nature, qtd. in Baumer 279) .

233

The convertibility of spirit and matter is, of course, the ground
premise of _Eu_r_ek_a, Limon's most important text. God is represented as
"Spirit" and "unparticled matter," the ultimate unity of spirit and
matter, and the state from which the material universe proceeded and
toward which it is returning by means of the insuperable laws of
attraction and repulsion (Poetry and Tales 1276, 1282, etc.). Schelling
argues that the poet alone is capable of imagining this unity, and this,
Limon reasons, is the basis by which Poe violates his own anti-didactic-
critical principles to present Egg-31:3 as both a "Poem" and a "Book of
Truths" (Poetry and TaLeg 1259).

On this basis, according to Limon, Pym too is a poem, which he
reads through m and Schelling. He sees it as a dramatization of
the same trajectory, Pym's spiritual quest signalled by his colloquial
pronunciation of his own name in deceiving his Grandfather, spelled
phonetically as "Goddin" Pym (2.4). The overall thrust is not
diffusive, as others have read, but toward order and unity. The
Narrative begins with particularity and division everywhere. The
first three sentences initiate the pattern: "My name. . . . My father.. .

I was born. .. . My maternal grandfather." On the A_r:_1e_l , in the hold,
on the floating wreck Pym's consciousness is solipsistic, signalled
metaphorically by mirror imagery. But in the end, individual
identity and even consciousness have been obliterated, as Pym merges
with the world, through the symbolically encompassing white figure
and the chasm. Along the way Pym has grown. He grows from
"feckless youth" to a botanist, zoologist, and anthropologist,
fascinated and expansive on natural geonetric and architectural

formations, such as beehives and the bird rookery, that suggest design

234
and intelligence in nature. The Tsalalians represent Baconian-Lockean
empiricism, Limon reasons: they are analytic, systenatic, clever. But
Pym knows he must reject them, for they are blind to the spiritual
character of nature, and so susceptible to superstitious fear of nature.
Limon notes that Pym approaches ultimate unity through polarites:

the alternation of chaos and order, of willfulness and passivity, the
magnetism suggested by the aurora australis, and the Pole itself. In a
brilliant stroke he indicates the symbolic significance of the Pole by
invoking Hegel, much of whose work is founded on the notion that unity
is implicit in polarity:

In physics a lot has been said about pglarity, and this

concept has marked a great advance in the metaphysics of

physics, for as a concept it is nothing more nor less than the

determination of the necessary relationship between two

different terms, which, in so far as the positing of one is

the positing of the other, constitute a unity (Philosoghy of

Nature 1:210-211: qtd. in Limon Place 116).

Gothic Ronance

The most significant studies of m as a work in the Gothic mode
are discussed in the first part of this chapter. In fact, Gothic
features are so widely recognized in the text that they are diffused
across the criticism. Though it tends toward the skeptical, Gothic
Ronanticism is not so much a reaction against Romanticism as it is a
different reaction to the same collapse of faith in traditional
Christian cosmology and neoclassical rationalism. The hero's quest for

divine truth and fulfillment in the face of this loss is the same. But

235

whereas the Romantic hero exults in the liberation of his or her own
capacities, the Gothic hero experiences his world as dark, mysterious,
and terrifying, reflecting alienation from a divine order and real or
emotional isolation from other humans. One way to visualize the Gothic
dimensions of PM is to juxtapose it to other Gothic texts it resembles
in some respect. I would mention three: It resembles Moby—Dick in the
sheer perversity of the quest and the self-authorization of the hero; it
resembles The Rime of the Apcient MEETS, as many have noticed, in its
focus upon the agony of guilt and isolation of the living-dead: and it
resembles Thomas Beddoes' Death's Jest-book (1849), in its preoccupation
with death, and identification of death with krnowledge of and unity with
the noumenal world. No critic has noticed the remarkable resemblance,
but in his discussion of the macabre in dark Romanticism, Northrop Frye
inadvertently almost provides a gloss of Poe's obsession with death in
his documentation of Beddoes' : the omnipresent intrusion of morbidity:
the desire for death or near-death experiences: the prevalence of
grotesque images in which life and death interpenetrate (e.g. , the
standing corpse on the death-ship) , which are images of the threshold
(English Romanticism 51-86).

Oddly, the readings that retail themselves as Gothic are few and
thin. Frederick S. Frank's "The Gothic at Absolute Zero: Poe's
Narrative of ArthuL Gordon Pm" (1980) gives an accurate, serviceable
enumeration of Anglo-American Gothic conventions as they appear in Em,
but his descriptions of them, and his diverse interpretive phrases for
the ending are thuelves rendered in such Romantic language (Pym enters
"the sleep of white bliss or elemental blank" [28]) that he rarely

punctures the surface .

236

In "Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym and the Narrative Techniques of
Antarctic Gothic," William E. lenz compares Poe ("MS. Found in a
Bottle," 1833, and 2m), Cooper (Sea Lions, 1849), Melville (Moby-Dick,
1851), and Thomas Pynchon (L, 1963) for the Gothic uses which they made
of Antarctic materials. Poe first noticed the thematic conjunctions of
Gothic and sea fiction, in their frequent attention to isolated and
threatened individuals in an alien environment where conventional
expectations are frustrated. Like the conventional Gothic hero, Pym
experiences macabre, nightmarish events, including multiple
imprisonments, and fluxuations of consciousness as his world does not
submit to rational corprehension. The pervasive whiteness signals this
reversal, itself a reversal of the Gothic black as a symbol both of the
urnknown and of potential "knowledge of elerental being." Exploited by
Melville as well as Poe, it appears as "a mythic locus of meaning, one
that makes human beings utterly insignificant" (38).

G. R. Thompson's infuence study of German Idealism, Poe's Fiction:
Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (1973), is valuable and widely
quoted, but the mechanical application of his Romantic irony theory upon
gm is merely an instance of 'criticism-by-adjective,‘ with a pointless
listing of events or characters to simply label them "perverse,"
"ironic," or "absurd" ("perverse" appears nine times on page 182) (see
chapter six below). His subsequent work on m is of greater value.
Alethea Hayter, in an unnoticed, slightly Gothic reading, sees PM as a
"night-journey of terror" that perhaps "owes something to a technique

derived from opium experience" (143, 144) in her Qpium and the Ronantic

Imagination (1970) .

Notes

1The lines of influence they have traced to Moby—Dick, Mardi,
Pierre, and Omoo are too many to enumerate, and focus on Melville takes
us beyond the scope of this study. However, see Patrick Quinn, fig
French Face of Poe, Iola Haverstick, "A Note on Poe and Em in
Melville' s Omo__o," Poe Newsletter 2:1-2 (1969), 37: Grace Farrell Lee,
"Em and Moby-Dick: Essential Connections, " American Transcendental
anrterly, 37 (1978), 73-86: Charles N. Watson, Jr., "Prerature Burial
in Arthur Gordon Pym and Israelr Potter," American Literature, 47 (1975),
105-107: Michael Hollister, "Melville's Gam with Poe in Moby-Dick:
Bulkington and Pym," Studies in the Novel, 21 (1989), 279—91: Kent
Ljungquist, " 'Speculative Mythology' and the Titan Myth in Poe's gym and
Melville's Pierre," The Sphinx, 4 (1985), 250-57.

2Chiefly, Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (1950), Ieo Marx, The
Machine in the Garden (1964), and Richard Slotkin Rgg. eneration Through
Violence (1980).

3Indeed, Hawthorne claimed that license in nearly every preface
he wrote.

4The first to notice these associations in detail, Kaplan
provides a complete translation of the Hebrew norenclature.

5See Ernest Marcband's "Poe as Social Critic," American
Literature, 6 (1934): 7.8-43: Bernard Rosenthal, "Poe, Slavery, and the
Southern LiLterary Messenger: A Reexamination," Poe Studies, 7 (1974),
29-38: and Jay Hubbell's _The; South in American Literature, 528-50
and South and Southwest, 100-122.

6Among Poe reviews that have been cited are: James Russell '
Iowell' s A Fable For the Critics (1849): Robert Montgomery Bird's
Shepperd Lee (1836): Anne MacVicar Grant' 5 Memoires of an American Lagy
(1836): and Joseph Holt Ingraham' 8 South West (1836). All are reprinted
in Harrison: Lowell and Bird are reprinted in Essays and Reviews.

7"Like Nat Turner, the Black Cook strikes his victims on the
head, testifying to the symbolic danger to reason posed by. . . savagery"
(128) -

8For this discussion of Romanticism, I found to be helpful Frye's
gngljsh Ronanticifl, M. H. Abrams' Natural _S_up_ernaturalism, Mario Praz'
The Rorantic Agony, G. R. Thompson, ed. , The Gothic Imagination, and
Franklin Baumer ' 3 Modern Eurggan Thought .

gLimon points out that Poe's familiarity with Natggphilosophie
and its chief figures, Friedrich Schelling and Hegel, were indirect
prior to Eyg, through Coleridge, Carlyle, and William Whewell: but he
probably read them in translation as they appeared in the 1840's, for
instance in Fredric Hedge's Proge Writers of Germa_r_ny (1847) (Place
201).

237

Chapter Six

"All the Outward Signs of Intelligibility": gym and Modernism

Context

Much of American criticism of the last twenty years has taken shape
in the tension between two conflicting kinds of response to contenporary
French theory, and in Poe studies they have converged with particular
force. On one hand is the often-noted resistance to theory in favor of
historical scholarship, and to French theory in particular for the
corrosive effect it tends to have on the traditional structures within
which Americanists have organized our literature, and by which we
have understood ourselves and our past--for example, the Adamic myth,
and concepts of progress and of national unity itself. On the other
hand, we have experienced a "shock of recognition," to use Edmund
Wilson's term. Poststructural methodologies such as deconstruction and
phenomenology pry open narrative and linguistic structures within texts
in ways that reveal early American writers, and notably Poe, to have had
concerns and sensibilities surprisingly familiar to the modern artist
and critic.

Along with Emerson, Poe has received the nmost concentrated
attention in conjunction with modernism. m, the horror tales, and

recently, the comic tales and Eureka have been particularly inviting to

238

239
modernist scrutiny in a number of respects. In this field M has
attained its status as the chief text in Poe's and arguably in
nineteenth-century writing.

One problem in discussing 'modern Poe, ' as R. C. De Prospo calls
the field in his review of several books, is the lack of a single
meaning for the term. De Prospo complains that the modern readings of
Poe in general tend to be unoriginal and redundant, "communicating
little beyond an obsessive display of their own tendencies," and he may
well be right within the rather narrow bounds that he draws (49). But
he dismisses any recent reading which does not deconstruct metaphysical
presence, such as the recent "revisionist historiography" of Quentin
Skinner and others, as "antiquarian" and "reactionary" (58). Perhaps,
as Frank Kermode suggests, we should speak of moderniss (Bradbury 34).
In any case, whether we consider modernism in America as a fairly
well-defined historical moment during the early twentieth century, as a
longer movement beginning with the American Revolution (Pease 7-8) or
the American Renaissance (lFeidelson 5, 43, 75: Riddel 124), or as an
essentially ahistorical "desire" for a discontinuity with a past, as
Paul de Man defines it (149), we cannot assume historicization of Poe is
'other-than-modern, ' to use DeProspo's term.

This study will premise a broader conception of what constitutes
modernism. Fundamentally, it is the social and intellectual breakdown
of the categories of order western cultures had been formulating from
the Renaissance and beyond. Warfare, scientific advance, fragnmentation
of society and pluralization of worldviews produced crises of confidence
in God, progress, and even existence, a spiritual crisis that

transformed the arts, philosophy, and religious and social life.

240
Northrop Frye discusses the origins of Romanticism in the breakup of the
concord between rational and empirical categories of knowing on one
hand, tracing back through Bacon, Newton, and Descartes to classical
Greece, and the biblical mythology which has even more deeply informed
western life, on the other (English 5-10). Surely Romanticism in this
respect represents an initial stage of modernism. From this point of
view, postmodern art and poststructural philosophy can be seen as an
extension and refinement in focus of the same set of crises, rather than
a departure.

This framework will exhibit what is in fact, De Prospo's
observation notwithstanding, a considerable play among the modern
readings of Poe, and appreciation for the range of his participation
across modern discourse. At the outset, we can affirm that despite this
play, and the variety that follows, there is one orienting point of
consensus: with the lone exception of Lawrence, modern readings
invariably conceptualize Poe himself as a modern or protomodern, and
their task as analyzing his modern insight. He is always finally the
deconstructor , never the deconstructee . 1

This chapter will examine modernist readings of 3m in two
categories of emphasis, with admittedly unstable and overlapping
boundaries. After looking briefly at studies that tend to perceive Poe
generally as a protonodern literary innovator, influencing
twentieth-century modernist poetics, we will concentrate upon those
largely ahistorical deconstructionist readings of gm that analyze the
text as a metafiction and a metalanguage which employs self-referential
strategies in order to deconstruct representation. Finally, we will

examine those studies which, informed by poststructural linguistic

241

insight, nonetheless look beyond questions of expression and
represention to find implication of other philosophical issues,
effectively reintroducing intellectual and social history, now from a

modern point of view.

2

Protomodern Poe

In 1961 Martin Heidegger summarized his experience of the modern
world:
The spiritual decline of the earth is so far advanced that the
nations are in danger of losing the last bit of spiritual
energy that makes it possible to see the decline. . . The
darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the
destruction of the earth, the transformation of men into a
mass . . . have assumed such proportions throughout the earth
that such childish categories as pessimism and optimin have
long sinnce become absurd. (qtd. in Bradbury 327)
Such a diagnosis is not far from the worldview refracted through the '
prism of Poe's fiction. Similarly, recent. Poe critics have configured
his central concerns in ways that might be seen as coincident with
Heidegger's preoccupations--with the problem of being and certitude:
with the anxiety of death and death itself as phenomena important to our
unnderstanding of life: and with the quest for an authentic existence in
the face of dehumanizing forces.2 Of course Heidegger's quest led him

to emnbrace a moveent that proved to be the perfection of dehumanization

242
and nihility. But the world of the twentieth century was in the making

in Poe's day, and Poe's perception was sensitive enough to register the
fragmenting and isolating impact which the convergence of social,
economic, scientific, and technological forces was already exerting upon
the individual. Louis Rubin says mmnch the same thing when he linnks Poe
to traditional Southern agrarian dissent: he uttered "an appalled
protest against dehumanization and the stifling of the human spirit in a
mechanistic universe," the one antebellum writer able "to perceive the
human capacity for evil that was soon to result in the enormous
blood-letting of the Civil War" (147-48)--or, as David Hirsch reminds
us, of world war, the Gulag, and the Final Solution.

But Poe's focus was relentlessly upon the individual. His accounts
of individuals alienated from social or divine authority, and
from society itself, call into question concepts of unity, harmny, and
faith that had organized Western life for millenia. As we discussed in
chapter three, many have found Poe to prefigure Freud in challenging
Cartesian, Lockean, and Romantic conceptions of a unitary and rational
self. This is the sense in which Allen Tate views Poe, "the
transitional figure in modern literature, because he discovered our
great subject, the disintegration of the personality" (Carlson
Rggggition 241). ’

But the French led the way in the recognition in Poe of a modern
sensibility and poetic. His experimentation with the symbol and other
devices was so influential upon the French Symnbolist movement that they
themselves regarded him as a kind of founder. 3 Like them, Poe sought
a purity of expression beyond the capacity of contenporary conventions ,

and his work served as a sort of laboratory of techniques for

243

versification and imagery to create effects that preserve some of the
indefiniteness, the synaesthesia, and the musicality, for instance, that
can characterize phenomenal experience. Underlying this innovation is
the stance in Poe toward the separateness and self-reference of poetry,
a fundamental shift that Theodor Adorno places at the "watershed" of
modern aesthetics: art after Poe and Baudelaire "seeks to discard
illusion without resigning itself to being a thing among things. The
harbingers of modernism, Poe and Baudelaire were the first technocrats
of art" (qtd. in Harold Bloom "Inescapable" 25). Ambivalent though
Eliot was, this is the same basis on which he came to recognize Poe's
contribution to modern poetry, in his "advance of self-consciousness"
and "extreme awareness" of language. He quotes Baudelaire on this
point: Poe established that "the goal of poetry is of the same nature
as its principle, and that it should have nothing in view but itself"
(Carlson Recggpition 215, 219).4

Charles .‘Feidel-son was the first American to develop the thesis
that Poe and other Renaissance writers experimented with language in
ways that prefigured modern literature. In Milan and American
Literature (1953) he advances the argnment that these writers
constituted a native symbolist movement, one that resembles in certain
respects the French movement it predates. Inheritors of the extrene
dualism of the American Puritans, they had a heightened consciousness of
the gap between the human mind and the world, or, by extension, the word
and the thing. Thus, like Jonathan Edwards in his metaphysical writing,
and Cotton Mather in his hagiography, Emerson, Poe, and their
contenporaries were attracted to the symbol as a possible way out of the

impasse, a third alternative to pure subjectivism, and equally

244

groundless objective representation through severely delimited
faculties. But while symbolic theory for Mather and Edwards was
inseparable from their theisn and revelation, both Renaissance and
modern writers' explorations of symbolic expression involved language as
autonomous, independent of author and world alike. Meaning is/was seen
as generated by and within language:
Once we refuse to contemplate a separate reality 'meant by'
the word, meaning becomes an activity that generates a
pattern. By turning away from the old dichotomy, the
symbolist uncovers a new variety, what (I. A.] Richards calls

"the fabric of our meanings, which is the world." (56)

3

Deconstructionist Poe

Clearly, as Feidemon recognized, to confront the crises of the
modern experience is increasingly to confront language itself. In 1914
Kafka complained "What I write is different from what I say, what I say
is different from what I think, what I think is different from what I
ought to think, and so it goes on further into the deepest darkness"
(qtd. in Bradbury 328). ~ This observation reflects the letter and the
spirit of flat Richard Sheppard called the "crisis of language" at the
core of the modern problems of faith, epistemology, and being, all
enfolded within Kafka's renark. Obstructing or somehow failing to
commnnicate reality, language becomes increasingly the object of

scrutiny and reference for the philosopher, the poet, and the critic.

245

A number of critics of Poe focus upon his deconstruction of the
relationship between word and thing, or language and meaning, by
exposing, as Kafka does with his image of the abyss, the
futility of the quest for an original presence. whas seemed to them
to be richly ironic and self-referential, folding back upon itself to
coment upon its own textuality, raising questions about the very
fictive, linguistic, and cognitive structures that constitute it:
calling attention to its own corplex performance: and questioning its
own proffered grounds of authority. At the same time, the reader can
never dismiss the possiblility that 'Poe is simply duping his readers,
much as his character Von Jung, of "Mystifications," confused his
duelling opponent with the Latin book on duelling protocol, rendered
nonsensical by the removal of every third word: It is "so ingeniously
framed so as to present to the ear all the outward signs of
intelligibility, and even of profundity, while in fact not a shadow of
meaning exist[s]" (260-61.).

We have discussed the most notable of the deconstructionist
readings, Lacan's analysis of the sign in "Seminar on 'The Purloined
Letter'" (1956), and Derrida's analysis of Lacan in his "The Purveyor of
Truth" (1965).'5 Iacan found the significance of the chief sign, the
letter to the Queen, lay not in its increasingly irrelevant contents but
in the power it lent its possessor, 35 a sign, as it changed hands in an
Oedipal power struggle. Derrida's critique of Lacan served to further
destabilize and decenter the sign. Derrida demonstrates that the
sign/letter has reference not to the phallus at the center of Lacan's
Freudian structure, but to other texts/letters in an endless chain of

signification, implied in expanding narrative frames of the story Poe

246

has provided, as well as the texts of psychoanalysis with which Lacan
‘hhmself attempts to frame/contain the story. Truth refuses
establishment, receding infinitely ahead of us.

Joseph Riddel, in "The Crypt of Edgar Poe" (1972), Michael
Williams, in A Werld of words (1989), Kenneth Dauber, "The Problem of
Poe" (1972) and The Idea of Authorship in America (1990), and several
others come to similar conclusions. Riddel, for instance, demonstrates
in his analysis of "The Fall of the House of Usher" how the setting of
the story is a "world of words," everywhere the "spirit of the sign"
(120, 125), instanced in the library, Roderick's paintings and wild
songs, the "Mad Triste" story-within-the-story: and even the text's
differentiation of narrator/Roderick, Roderick/House, human/world,
subject/object. The letter with which Roderick summoned the narrator
announces a crisis, but its meaning is indeterminate, ever deferred in
textuality. .Like the house itself, the narrative splits along the
fissure in the house's wall, grewing out of the abyssal tomb»at the
house's center. Fissure and tomb image the abyss between language and
truth: the collapse upon an empty center "exposes the fiction of the
origin," and reflects the centerless being and existential agony of
Roderick.

In the study of Eng, this line of thinking was opened by FrenCh
critics who first recognized it as a self-referential narrative.
Studies by Jean Ricardou (1967), Maurice Mburier (1974), Maurice Lévy
(1974), and Claude Richard (1974) resemble eadh other in offering Pmm's
journey as an allegory of the narrative's composition, organized around
:metaphors of script and scripting. Ricardou's "The Singular Character

of the water," the only one translated (for Poe Studies, 1976), is the

247

most often cited in the American studies. For him, Pym is making a
"journey to the bottom of the page" (4), where meaning, constituted in
the opposition of black ink on a white ground, gives way to the
blankness beyond the bottom margin of the page--reflected in the
undifferentiated whiteness around the Pole and the narrative's abrupt
cessation. Like all text, gyp ultimately can be "about" nothing other
than itself, dramatizing its own insularity.

working in this paradigm, American critics have found other forms
of self-referentiality, elaborating in various ways the observation that
the narrative, as Jehn Carlos Rowe puts it, "'progresses' from an
ordinary referential discourse to a poetic expression in which the
'metaphoric structure of language materializes in a landscape of signs"
(Custom-House 97). Daniel Wells offers a brief but vivid and
influential reading, entitled "Engraved‘Within the Hills: Further
Perspectives on the Ending of Exp" (1977), in which Poe, as artist, and
his creations, the artist's inscribed self, conspicuously
interpenetrate. In the "Mr. Poe" of the Preface and Nete, in the
"representation of a human figure" carved into the marl, pointing Pym
"to the region of the South," and in the chasm glyphs themselves, which
wells feels spell out Poe's name backwards, a kind of signature on a
textualized landscape, the creating self punctures the boundaries of his
creation (23AJIO). Correspondingly, the narrative concludes by staging
the reabsorption of the creatures into the imagination which generated
them. The great, shrouded figure is "the apotheosis of the creative
imagination itself": disappearing into the misty chasm, "Pym.is absorbed
back into his Poe-lar source" (14). Is there a point to this display,

beyond highlighting the "artificiality of art"? In his own rather'hasty

248

conclusion, Wells reasons that the final biblical-sounding quote ("I
have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust...") is
a note of authorial reprisal against dull and inappreciative readers
"blind to the ingenuity which lies before their eyes, but beyond their
vision" (15).

wells focuses upon images of authorial signature: Stephen
Mainville, Paul Rosensweig, Stephen Donadio, and G. R. Thompson all have
other candidates for the central trope by which Poe represents writing
and its limits. For Donadio, it is a complex.architectural symbol
presented indirectly: the ruin. A provocative analysis previously
unnoticed by Poe and m bibliographers, "Enerson, Poe, and the Ruins of
Convention" (1986) juxtaposes these authors to Show how the violence of
each against formal genres grows out of prophetic visions of modernity,
and founds "aesthetic principles central to the development of modernist
form" (84) . For 13m, he recasts the well known problutic features of
the narrative in terms of aesthetic intention: the narrative disorder
and disruptions, the disconnections and lack of narrative "memory," the
juxtaposition of the familiar with the strange, the sudden
transformation "before our eyes" of representational mode (i.e. mundane,
dreamworld; realistic, irrational), and, most important, the sense of
incompletion. He maintains that in precisely those ways in which‘Eug,
as well as Emerson's essays, are thought to fail in Romantic fonmal
terms, they are nodernist masterworks, abstract rather than mimetic. He
compares the experience of reading gym to Observing an architectural
ruin: the structure superficially appears incomplete, but its deeper
effect'is that of a structure in a state of decay or demolition. it is

fragmentary, anachronistic, disjointed, and for the viewer disorienting.

249

Of course, as Donadio admits, this symbolism is within the bounds
of the Gothic Romantic imagination. But he argues that the tension at
the center of Romantic discourse, the "vastness of artistic vision"
against the limitations of the achievable-what might be called, to use
Frye's term, the "Kantian dilemma" (English 84)—-led inevitably to the
radical aesthetics and focus upon form that characterize modernism.
When an artist attempts to represent transcendent truth as a whole,
containing, so to speak, the structure within the language of the text,
he or she is bound to fail. Grasping this inherent limitation, Poe and
Emerson recognized the greater potential for representation in a
fragment. Like a ruin, it can evoke an idea of the whole even as it
inherently displays its own inability to present it whole. Whether Poe
and Emerson made an epistemological breakthrough, and if so what that
might involve, Donadio is studiedly evasive, though if he thought they
did their essential Romanticism would be reaffirmed. His burden is to
prove an aesthetic breakthrough. Far from a failure, m is a "triumph
of vision," pioneering a new perspective we would later see in Pound's
Cantos, and Rodin's sculptures of body fragments, for instance.

Mainville, in "language and the Void: Gothic Landscapes in the
Frontiers of Edgar Allan Poe" (1981), takes as a point of departure the
landscape analysis of gm, including the work of Edwin Fussell, Leslie
Fiedler, and Kent Ljungquist, Jr. , to offer the frontier as the trope of
representation in m and the unfinished Journal of Julius Rodman
(1846). Yet, probably Ricardou is his closest precursor. Like the
margin of a page, the frontier carries a double significance,
representing both a border and what is beyond. Like the "unexplored"

on an early map, it is a set of "meaningful marks," yet it stands for an

250

unmarked region, meaningless because unrepresented. But the geographic
frontier for Poe is only an image of the interior frontier of human
identity, marking "the unknown, the limit of consciousness" (347).
Mainville argues that in Poe's fiction, human identity is linked to
consciousness, which can exist only in the conditions of signification,
that is only within the context of language: "To step out of
language--out of human context... is to inhabit the inhuman void, the
pretext of humanity" (357).

Corresponding to this image is Pym himself, whose physical
penetration of the frontier reflects his own dual signifance as a human
figure but also, monstrously, a figure of the void--one of the scouts
for Poe's own linguistic expeditions. Pym travels beyond the point to
which language and human-ness can follow him, but even before this we
sense an otherworldly significance about‘him, In his refusal, against
all argument, to believe that the figures carved in the marl are
writing, that they are anything but contextless, meaningless marks of
nature (see 23AJIO), Pym dismisses the context of signification:
"Adverse to using or apprehending any interpreting symbols," Pym's
"literalness is in contrast to what makes [him] distinct fram others,
his ability to use language as symbol" (357). Mainville identifies
provocative questions in M and Rodman about the definition of humanity
and the cogito, but, like some of the other Deconstructors of this
section, he has a tendency to avoid pursuing them, choosing at opportune
moments to move laterally to identify additional figures of textuality
or the void. anetheless, Ketterer's dismissal of his essay as
"muddled" is unaccountable ("Tracing" 255).

Rosensweig focusses upon the recurring "false ending" as a trope of

251
epistemological uncertainty, with particular reference to the final one,
the pseudo-biblical quote in which rock is apparently ground into dust,
a metaphor for the disintegration of meaning.6 Rosensweig uses Eytho
try to grind to dust previous interpretive paradigms, all of which
misinterpret the ending as either a muddled contrivance, an "allegory"
of a deep psychological or spiritual meaning, or a meaningful
self-reflexive message encrypted in the linguistic materials. He
identifies two conflicting trajectories in the novel, the powerful
thrust toward an end, in the senses of completion of the journey, of
literary form, and of telos. "Mr. Poe" is as obsessed with getting the
journey in print, as the Note editor is in trying to force a meaning
upon Pym's data, as Pym is of readhing the Pole, along the way stocking
the reader's expectations with the promise of "the most intensely
exciting secret which has ever engrossed [the world's] attention"
(17.12).

Against this is the text's refusal to yield a true ending, offering
only fantasy endings that do not end (his disappearance into the polar
chasm), that do not appear (the final "two or three chapters" lost with
Pym; the silent Peters and Mr. Poe), and that fail to provide meaning
and closure (Pym's actual accidental death, the editor's hollow
analysis; the bogus biblical text). In the process, "the very concept
of endings and meanings" is undermined; the deific final voice is not
only false but "garbled and unclear," and the search for authentic
meaning is doomed to frustration (142, 149).

As interest grows in Poe's last major work, Eureka (1848), his
rather arcane cosmogony, critics are increasingly making comparisons

with gym. Both texts are concerned with ultimate questions, with

252,

origins, and with ends ; both transcend the genres they participate in,
and utilize language and literary conventions in innovative and unique
ways: and both variously draw attention to their own design and language
--an irresistible attitude for poststructuralists. Allen Tate first
suggested that Poe's work should be read in light of _Eyrgkg and his other
"theological" writings (by which he means the so—called angelic
dialogues), and Charles O'Donnel discusses it at length in his 1962 m
essay. More recently, John Irwin (1980) and John Carlos Rowe
(Custom—House [1984]) interlard their _Pm analyses with substantial
cement on m, while John Limon (1990) and Cynthia Miecznikowski
(1990) offer full-scale intertextual readings:7 Miecznikowski's
"End(ing)s and Mean(ing)s in 13m and M" is somewhat unique, in that
she reads each book against the other, and both against Poe ' s theory of
poetry. She sees Em and Eureka not, as others have, as simple cmple-
ments, the former dramatically prefiguring the metaphysical exposition
of the latter. More subtly, Elm is a "kind of apologia" for M, an
explanation of the epistemological problem which language in quest of
truth runs up against--and which, in Pm, brings language to a halt.

Others have argued that these works violate Poe ' s first axian
that truth is beyond the bounds and aim of poetry.8 Miecznikowski
is the first to argue that these overtly truth-driven quests rather
grow out of and illuminate this principle. 13% is a "Book of
Truths, " highly indebted to contemporary science, as Limon
demonstrates, but in it Poe ridicules rational and empirical methods,
and presents it rhetorically as "speculative inquiry, based on
unverifiable intuition" (Miecznikowski 57). Its Preface places it in

the realm of poetry and beauty, the "locus of the soul," involving for

253

Poe not intellectual insight but aesthetic effect, offering at best an
"indefinite... briefest glimpse" of divine truth (56). Where M's
verbal imagery ends in the abyss and silence, _Et_1_rg};a_ is verbose but
fails to disclose full meaning, able only to suggest the inconceivable
(infinity, nothingness, absolute unity) in conceivable ways: partially,
negatively. She cites Joan Dayan, who points out that the
multiplication of synomyms, dashes, and other tentative signs campounds
reading difficulty and indicates negatively that truth lay beyond the
reach of language. For both books, "words fail to deliver the writer to
his end (or the reader to the ending)" (59).

One of the more influential poststructural studies of American
literature, Rowe's flough the Custom-House, yields a reading of m
that has itself been frequently cited in Poe studies. It stands above
many of the others for its gracefulness and clarity—not always cannon
in this discourse—which seem to arise out of a genuine desire to
illuminate both French theory and American literature, rather than
merely to sound Derridean. His stated aim is to combine an intertextual
approach and a focus upon marginalized, problelatic texts to free new
insights fram a literature long daminated by the "oppressive
mythologies" that have have campelled us to look at texts in the same
few ways. Certainly a healthy attitude to take toward m, it has
enabled him, as he claims, to exploit rather than repress, the
irregularities that distinguish the text, and allow the wider play of
signification it demands. Like the others in this chapter, he considers
the inconsistencies and disjunctions not to be flaws, but part of a
campleted design. Epitomizing his own essay, he offers an insuperable

smmary of the narrative's principle mechanism:

254

Forever holding out the promise of a buried signified,
Pm offers a sequence of forged or imitation truths:
delivered messages, deciphered hieroglyphs, a penultimate
vision. And yet, the inability of each successive sign to
present its truth is ironically disclosed, increasingly
entangling any reading in the signifying web it attempts to
unravel. (93)
Rowe's focus then is the textuality instanced within and throughout the
text, which renders ordinary representation problematic at every turn by
doubling and trebling displacerent (in fact, as he says, rendering it
infinite). In this Barthian funhouse, Poe has anticipated the
Saussurean conception of meaning as constituted within language, and
Derrida's difference, by which meaning or presence is at once
constituted in the 'differential' play of signifiers, as Saussure
postulated, and 'deferred, ' an absence indicated by the presence of a
sign, and perpetuated by the endless displacetent of signs, for as long
as one cares to try to represent reality. It is the simultaneous
presence and absence indicated by the sign that constitutes what Rowe
calls the "doubleness of writing, " enacting both desire and repression.
m one hand, "for Poe, language has the power to destroy the facticity
of human experience and present that 'other world ' for which human
beings instinctively yearn," a "simulacrmm of lost presence" (106, 97);
on the other, it is destined to defer and frustrate that desire it has
created. As a virtual signifier machine, 3m intensifies this
experience for the reader, and in so doing, it "enacts the
deconstruction of representation as the illusion of truth" (95) .

Like Rowe, John T. Irwin in American Hiergglyphics is concerned -

255
with the fundamental doubleness of writing, and anticipated most of
Rowe's general conclusions. Hewever, Irwin's willingness to utilize
other texts, not only from contemporary theory but from moments prior to
and contemporaneous with Poe himself distinguishes his work from Rowe's,
who does not deliver on his own promise to do so.9 Thus, while Rowe's
briefer treatment is more eloquent, Irwin's analysis acquires a depth
and authenticity enabled by the reconstruction of the environment within
which firm was born. Moreover, as a genuinely cross-disciplinary
approach, it more accurately represents sure of the complexity of
society itself, and permdts Irwin to unfold philosophical and social
implications in gym which, while not outside language, are not confined

to reiterating the illusion of representation.

4

Philosophical Poe: Reconstituting the Context

This is the case with each of the studies that remain to be
discussed. Like the previous studies, they are enlightened by
poststructural insights and recognize more or less the linguistic
determination of philosophical and social concepts. They come to many
of the same conclusions as those discussed above, but also to additional
ones, correcting an ahistorical bias. As Russell Raising put it, "For
many contemporary theorists, the question of American literature's
social or historical significance is not so much engaged and transcended
as it is ignored" (200). Eugenio Donato succinctly articulates the

problem:

256
If the linguistic reference of words is words, if texts refer
to nothing but other texts, then. . . there is nothing to
interpret, for each sign is in itself not the thing that
offers itself to interpretation but interpretation of other

signs. (37)

One can move in either of several directions fram this point of
departure. One choice has been to repeatedly locate in texts the
message in the conditional clause of Donato's analysis. For some,
Joseph Riddel, Michael Williams, and Dennis Pahl for instance, the
staging of the abyss is itself the distinguishing feature of American
literature.

Others have been unwilling to simply reiterate the hermeneutic
loop. They follow up in genuine intertextual readings the traces-4the
protensions and retentions that Derrida considers the temporal
equivalent of difference, recreating segments of an intellectual or
social horizon. Indeed, this is Derrida's own procedure, in his
cements on "The Purloined Letter" ("Purveyor"). As Frank Lentricchia
has demonstrated, Derrida's own methodology resembles less that of
American deconstruction than it does Foucault's "archeology" of
discursive fields or, we might add, Bakhtin's analysis of the infusion
of conventional literary structures of the heteroglossia that
characterizes society in any given moment (.A_ft_e; ch. 5)

To elaborate a few examples in American studies of this latter
direction, Evan Carton, for example, reads Poe and other Renaissance
writers through Hegel, identifying dialectic strategies by which they

sought to assert and sustain contradictory impulses toward, on one hand,

257

grounding in a transcendent presence, through identification with nature
or humanity, and on the other toward individuality and originality.

This defines the tense ambivalence of the relationship of the doubles in
"William Wilson," for instance. The narrator resists union, but
cleavage and unity are "performatively" sustained against each other,
Carton reasons, by Poe's hand.

Stanley Cavell, in "Being Odd, Getting Even" (1985), reads Emerson
and Poe through Descartes, arguing that both interrogate and ultimately
affirm the cogito argument, the assertion that thought certifies
existence. In his quest for a theoretical ground for self-authority,
Emerson raised the bar, emphasizing the provisionality already implicit in
Descartes: I exist only so long as I think, sinking into conformity and
nonexistence the mment I cease to "claim it, stake it, enact it" (109).

Poe, in his analysis of perversity, advances a negative proof.
Cavell calls Poe's stories "philosophical essays turned fiction," and he
sees Poe's narrators' perversity as part of a feverish "longing for
assurance" (138). While Descartes held that free will entailed moral
responsibility, the narrators' confessions token a lack of
responsibility, preserving the cogito. "For Poe we are responsible
metaphysically for our errds exactly because we are not morally
responsible for them. I §_m_ the one who cannot refrain" (142). Thus, as
Descartes assumes a skeptical stance--inductive logic-~33 part of a
procedure that leads to affirmation, Poe parodies skepticism in his own
desperate affirmation.

Jean Dayan, on the other hand, in her richly intertextual reading
Fables of the Mind, finds Poe to be fundamentally skeptical. Drawing on

a line of influence first suggested by Joel Porte, she argues that the

258
most important pretexts for Poe's metaphysics and epistemology are
Iockean empiricism and Edwardsean Calvinin, a genealogy he both
received and revised.10 As a janus-faced figure, looking back to
eighteenth century rationalism and ahead to modernism, Poe's career was
a "massive attack" on nineteenth-century intellectual structures and
society itself.

Returning to Irwin, we can see that, unlike Rowe, whose ahistorical
focus upon doubleness blurs the distinction between Poe and twentieth
century modernists, Irwin argues that the Renaissance writers' probing
of language was inseparable from the Romantic quest for origins.
language was regarded as double in the sense that it both stands for a
thing and for the absence of the thing itself. They felt sure that if
they could reach back to a point prior to this duality, the organic
unity between word and thing could be reestablished. Nineteenth-century
obsessions with two geographic questions grew out of this quest: .the
search for the source of the Nile, and the quest for the South Pole,
both of which converge in m. Today it is probably hard for us to
imagine the mystery with which people contemplated these goals ,
involving, as they did for many, expectations of supernatural or
ultimate discoveries. But we begin to appreciate this as a result of
Irwin ' s remarkable reconstructions and analyses of nineteenth-century
scientific, poetic, and journalistic discourses, incorporating in
addition to the Nile and the South Pole, other lines of inquiry, such as
the coulogy of Humboldt and Kepler, the natural science of David
Brewster and others, and the anthropological, linguistic, and
biblical-historical theory of John Stephens, Jacob Bryant, Charles

Anthon, and others, all of whom were concerned with origins, all of whom

259
interested Poe, and all of whom bear some relevance to EVE-

Irwin, of course, pays particular attention to the figure of the
hieroglyph, interesting to the other Renaissance writers, but used by
Poe as the organizing symbol in a number of works. In M, it is the
single image by which he associates the search for the Pole with the
search for the source of the Nile, entailing geographic, cultural, and
linguistic origins. “Called to attention by Champollion's deciphering of
the Rosetta in 1821, Poe and certain other writers saw it as a form of
writing more_primitive and potent than phonetic writing. Irwin
summarizes the significance and the promise it held for them:

Underlying Whitman's sense that "in the best poems re-appears
the body" [from "A Song of the Rolling Earth"], is the image
of writing as hieroglyphic doubling, theimage of the work pf
art as the _writer's inscribed other, self. And certainly. part
of the immense symbolic importance of the Egyptian
hieroglyphs for the . . . Renaissance is that they represent the
archetypal form of writing in which the outline of a body is
rendered visibly present. Wherever the question of certainty
arises... the hieroglyphs are never far away, for [they]. . ..

achieve[d] the visible presence, the self-evidence, of

pictographic signs. “(’98) -
Clearly, the interest in linguistic origin implied more than language:
they believed it intersected with the origin of humanity itself. In
this myth, of which Narcissus is the pretext, the human self originated
with the most primitive 'linguistic' act of all, a "nameless creature"
recognizing and naming its own image, 'inscribed' as a shadow or a

reflection. This "alogical" moment, in which a supposedly

260

yet-nonexistent self recognizes itself as doubled, requires a recognition
of the image simultaneously as different from and the same as itself, as
split and doubled. The hieroglyph as a metaphor bears what language
cannot contain, this prelinguistic point of origin. Moreover,
indescribable though it may be, the hieroglyph promises presence and
origin. Hieroglyphs and analogues are everywhere in M, and the
trajectory is ever away fram arbitrary and toward hieroglyphic language.

Irwin's attention is directed toward the interplay of doubles,
which is thrown into ever greater relief as M's universe is reduced
into basic binary relations (and beyond, in the polar abyss, symbol of
immediate, undifferentiated being.) Irwin shows how Poe isolates
moments of alogicality and indeterminacy at the core of identity,
focussing particularly upon instances of writing as a "written self ," a
doubling of the self who writes: Poe-Pym, which Pym reverses by
inscribing "Mr. Poe" in his own narration (initiating, of course, an
infinite exchange of authorship, for "Mr. Poe" has himself inscribed an
explicitly fictional Pym in his own fictionalized version for the
Messenger, etc.) Not only is writing destabilized by the confusion of
narrative authority, but the subject is as well. Selfhood in this
equation is not a simple sum of body/shadow, but arises reflexively out
of the "mutually-constituted opposition."

This is the frame in which Irwin interprets the climax as a
skeptical pronouncement. Pym' s merging with the great white shrouded
figure, which he imbues with divine status--a divine hieroglyph—seems
the ultimate Rmantic gesture. However, Pym is looking at his own vast,

light shadow. Poe, Irwin suggests, presents one of the polar

meteorological pheimena he knew fram David Brewster's Natural Magic

261
(1831) to highlight Pym's metaphysical blindness: "By interpreting the
misty figure with its aura of divinity as Pym's unrecognized shadow, the
reader recognizes that 'God' has always been a self-projected,
idea-lized image of man," or, as he puts it elsewhere, the intellect
tries to "survive death by projecting an image of itself (the self as
image) into the infinite void of the abyss" (226, 205).

Dennis Pahl, in a chapter on _Pm, "Poe/Script: The Death of the
Author in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon 2113," in his Architects of the
Abyss (1987), examines the constitution of the subject in the textuality
that surrounds it, but virtually all of its insight derives from Rowe
and, especially, Irwin. He does offer an interesting configuration of
the Pym/"Mr. Poe" double as a William Wilson-like struggle for mastery
and presence. As written selves, both are an absence. "Mr. Poe"
asserts authorship of Pym' s narrative by supplying the germinal idea, by
serving as editor, and by actually fictionalizing part of it under his
own name. At the same time, Pym, in producing his own narrative
(including "Mr. Poe"), attezpts to acquire self-authority, reflected in
his struggles to understand and master the world he travels through.

But Pym as narrator is finally unable to isolate a self outside the
textuality instanced within every episode—fictionalized by "Mr. Poe,"
departing from "Edgarton, " represented in a variety of notes he and
others write, and ultimately constituted in his own narrative.

In a recent article, "The Arabesque Design of Arthur Gordon 3m. ,"
revising a 1989 essay, G. R. Thampson builds upon his 1973 book P_g_e_'_§_
Fiction, which defined a significant German counterstrain within the
landscape of Romanticism. The principle mechanism of "Romantic irony,"

as he quotes Raymond Immerwahr, "the drastic violation of illusion by

262

reference within a literary work to its author and the process of its
creation, to the transgression of the boundary which separates our level
of reality as readers... frm the reality of the characters" (192). He
used this concept to help define Poe's ambivalent status within
Anglo-American Romanticism, for which he was, as Eliot and Edward
Davidson had argued, a "crisis," in Davidson's term (ix). Thompson's
recent article further refines this counterstrain, focussing on its
dominant form, the arabesque, which Friedrich Schlegel discussed in the
later eighteenth century. He also establishes it linkage to
poststructural theory. In the process he delivers an interpretation of
_Pm that far exceeds the utterly baffled 1973 reading.

Arabic pictoral art richly utilized the frame in ways that embed
the divine: according to Schlegel, writers were adapting these uses to
their narratives, in ways, Tharpson argues, that prefigure postmodern
fiction, in metaliterary reference to the infinite. Like the
carpetmakers, the writer of the "Arabesque Ralance" might make the frame
penetrate the framed design, or have it in same way point to infinite
reality beyond itself, or make a natural framed image dissolve into the
abstract frame. For sample, as Pym sails beyond the end of his own
narrative, the note that follows constitutes an artificial frame (the
rational world of publishing and philology) which accents its own
artifice and points to the void it is inadequate to frame. In a number
of ways, an "Arabesque Romance" like Em foregrounds the frame in ways
that menace conceptual boundaries , for instance between natural form and

abstract design, and between the framed finite and the unframeable

infinite .

263

The basic Arabesque structure is the quincunx, a f ive-pointed
parallelogram (four corner points framing a centerpoint) which can be
conceived either as a square or diamond shape, or a double or mirrored
"V." In The Garden of grrus, or the Quincuntiall, LozengeL or Net-work
flagtations of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturagly, Mystiglly
Considered (1658), Sir Thomas Browne, whose work was well-known to Poe,
discusses the universal recurrence and symbology of this infinitely
multipliable pattern. Thompson finds the quincuncial form everywhere in
m, but limits his analysis to the most concrete enample, the bird
rookery of Kerguelen's Island which so fascinates Pym with its
inter-species cooperation and the network of alternating penguin and
albatross nests. Thompson notes that in his lengthy description and
cammentary, Pym twice describes the quincuncial nest arrangerent itself
(14.13, 14.16), first as an albatross nest surrounded by four penguin
nests, and secondly, as a penguin nest surrounded by four albatross' .
The symbology of the quincunx is complex, as Browne and Thompson
describe it, but Poe's use of emphasizes its figuration of
reversibility, paradox, and indeterminacy, for in the world of the
rookery, despite its precision and order, there is no stable reference
point: the center is everywhere and nowhere.

In his 1987 Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing, Gerald Kennedy
reconstructs the "ideology and ideography of death" in the nineteenth
century, to show how American culture sought to contain, mitigate,
sentimentalize, and, in the theology of salvation, deny death. Poe's
writing, Kennedy argues, can be seen as a life-long assault upon this
mythology, for he experienced death as unmitigated life-shaping traumata

in the deaths of his mother, at age two, his foster mother, Frances

264
Allen, when he was twenty, his wife, whose fatal illness dominated his
life for five years before she succumbed at twenty-four, and early
prescience of his own premature death. Kennedy conceives of m as a
strategic collision of language, specifically the inscribed ideology of
death, and death itself, as immediate phenomenon and as primal anxiety.
Language "seeks to emulate death to deny it," but Pym's progressive
"confrontations with the body of death" prove it to be inarticulable
(171, 146). For the reader, if not for the obtuse Pym himself, Pym's
immersion takes the form of a series of "metaphors of illegibility":
Augustus' note to Pym in the hold of the Gra_mpus that his life is in
jeopardy (due to the mutiny); Pym's disguise as Rogers' corpse to shock
the mtineers in an effort to reclaim the ship; and the incident
involving the deathship, for instance. Each involves an attempt to read
either an actual text or to "read" or rationalize a situation involving
death; each attempt proves deceptive, resulting in the inarticulate
silence of the horror of death for Pym, and of the multiplied actual
deaths of others.

The cannibal scene is of particular interest for its sacred import.
Kennedy sees it as a parody of the sacrificial king, organized in
Christian and "pagan" ritual. As René Girard points out in Violence and
Egg Sacred, the king may be scapegoated as a way of organizing and
venting aggression. But as Kennedy argues, the cannibalization of
Parker involves physical appetite, not spiritual/camonal redemption:
moreover it does not channel violence away; it merely perpetuates the
chain of violence that had begun with the mtiny. By the time Pym
reaches the cliffside, his verbal and ritual strategies for containing

death have been so undermined that the only relief he can find from the

265
anxiety is death itself (so he lets himself fall.) In the final scene,
he disappears into the vortex, a prelude to physical death; but the
white figure is, for Kennedy, the narrative itself, "rising before him
to deliver him from.silence. He is about to be gathered into the
artifice of the text, to become an enduring subject caught in language
like a fly in amber" (172-173). Exchanging his physical life for an
inscribed life--falling into writing--enables the assurance of at least
a symbolic survival: "he loses his fear by gazing upon the 'perfect
whiteness' of the textual space in which the life of writing unfolds"
(173).

In a subsequent brief article, "Byg Pourri: Decomposing the
Textual Body" (1992), using the same critical paradigm, Kennedy would
concentrate upon scenes of putrefaction as a particularly forceful
imaging of utter annihilation. He contends that thematically the
decomposing human flesh functions as a trope of erasure, "effected by
the narrative itself in its relentless decamposing of the myths and
pieties of nineteenthecentury culture," including calling into question
rational epistemology and the belief in.a benevolent God (Kopley Egggg
174).

In a structuralist reading, Herbert F. Smith applies to m the
decoding model Roland Barthes used to read Balzac's "Sarrasine" in %.
Barthes traced the reader ' s cyclic movement through progressively more
sophisticated decoding strategies, as the text defeats his or her
expectations. Of the Barthes' five codes, Smith brings three to bear
upon m. When simple tracking of the plot and the names is disrupted
by a puzzle, or an impossible event, the reader moves down a level,

deferring expectations and suspending disbelief waiting for a solution.

266

But puzzles can accumulate to the point of overwhelming this strategy,
as they do in Em, resulting in a breakdown of etiology. The further
application of logic by the reader only leads to greater confusion--as
it does for Pym himself, who is unable to read beyond the simplest code.
The sophisticated reader is forced to the next level, recognizing that a
different logic, a different "cultural code" is being employed. Faith
and reason are progressively displaced as the modus operandi of the
narrative by an alternative code Poe introduces: that of an extant
matrix of ideas comprising an organicist geophysics at odds with the
dominant Aristotelian/Newtonian model of the universe. M's world
increasingly comes to resemble the organic worlds of John Cleve Symmes
and Richard Watson.

The former espoused a radical cosmology and geography that included
a landscape and human culture within a hollow earth, accessible through
marine portals at the poles. It was described in James McBride's
exposition The MS Theory of Concen_t£ic Sphereg (1826) and the novel,
probably by Symmes, Monial A Voyage of Discoveg (1820). Watson
described in his essay "On the Subjects of Chemistry" and elsewhere a
model of the earth as a great living organism, the animation within and
upon it as by sexual laws over those of mechanical physics}.l The
text Operates analogicaly and metonymically by the same principles: the
waters and rocks on Tsalal seem to have organic properties; and the
Tsalalians believe the ship is a living creature, which in Pym's organic
world is correct. Smith cites Marie Bonaparte for her Freudian reading
of the Grampus' hold and other sites of Pym's inhumation as wombs,
nurturing, threatening, and finally 'birthing' him. His analysis

culminates in the characterization of Pym's journey as a procreative act

267

producing the text itself. The reader is
forced to merge the creation of Pym with the larger creation
of the (Symlresian and Watsonian) earth... as the creative
maleness of Pym merges with mother Earth to close the cycle of
the text. Like the solitary spermatozoon uniting with the egg
after its long night swim, Pym rushes into the self-immolating
embrace of the shrouded figure. (92)
Smith argues that M, closer to postmodern fiction of "Borges, Barth,
and Nabokov" than Balzac's "Sarrasine" in the camplexity of its
encoding, carries the sophisticated reader to a reading level which will
appreciate the book "for what it is, a metafictional classic" (92). His
analysis does not support such a claim, however, though the M that
emerges is a richly dialogic novel for the historical traces adduced.
The transcendental signified is, by Smith's reading, displaced by Poe
from Newtonian physics to a radical organic theory, which remains intact
in the most sophisticated code Smith adduces. This would identify Poe
not so much as a prom-postmodernist, or any kind of modernist, but a
Romantic. Smith himself merely displaces signified presence fram
Watson/Symmes to the reader, who remains outside Smith's structure,
uncritically assumed to be a unified, predictable consciousness, and to
read in an orderly and uniform way.

In "'Postmodern' or Post-Auschwitz: The Case of'Poe" (1992), David
Hirsch also looks at Poe's work as an analysis of death, and his 3
assessment of Poe's work as the "disassembling of the Judeo-Christian
construct of the human form... of fusion of flesh and spirit" is not
far frum Kennedy's thesis. But his use of Poe refers to a later

historical moment, imputing to him something very close to virtual

268
prophetic status in relation to the twentieth century and the genealogy
of postmodern fiction. He prefers the term "Post-Auschwitz" not only as
more determinant, but for its focus on what to him is the most important
referent to the post-World War II "existential despair," a world "of
total war, mass murder, and genocide; an age of the death of God and
eclipse of Western culture and Judeo-Christian values" (142). Poe's
voice is of special resonance for Hirsch, for prior to Marx, Nietzsche,
and Freud, "his imagination somehow gained access to a vision of the
disintegration of the human form that was enacted in the death camps and
the Gulag" (142). Allen Tate anticipated Hirsch in this discovery, as
we discussed in chapter three, a debt that Hirsch acknowledges, wishing
only to refine our focus by the particular juxtaposition of 2m and
Auschwitz for the light it sheds on a post-war sensibility about death
and "the derangement of human relations" (145).

His comments on m are not extensive, but what emerges from his
explication of some of the death scenes, from the gratuitousness of the
violence, and the nonchalance of Pym' 5 report, is not the horror that
Kennedy finds, but a sense of the casualness of death. It is, he
argues, the "banality of evil" that Poe Opposes to the "grandeur of
evil" of Blake and Shelley. The latter looks back to Milton's Satan:
the former ahead to Auschwitz and the Gulag.

Despite previous expressions of disgust, Pym's description of the
cannibal act emphasizes orderliness in a matter-of-fact tone that belies
the claim of a profound impact:

Let it suffice to say that, having in sale measure appeased
the raging thirst which consumed us by the blood of the

victim, and having by common consent taken off the hands,

269

feet, and head, throwing them, together with the entrails,
into the sea, we devoured the rest of the body piecemeal,
during the four ever memorable days of the seventeenth,
eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth of the month. (12.9)
(The following sentence, as Hirsch points out, relates mundane
information about rain and a contrivance to catch it.) Hirsch compares
this with an Auschwitz "physician," who recounts the details of a
gassing and the menu of his subsequent meal in the same diary entry.

But this effect is not particular to criminals; Hirsch's point is
that it is characteristic of the age, weakening the distinctions between
criminal, victim, bystander alike. A recent television documentary
brilliantly illustrated for me--unwittingly--what Hirsch is driving at.
It excerpted the diary of a Jew in the Warsaw Ghetto before the roundup:

"Death ceases to impress. We see people killed on the streets and we
continue our business. People stop inquiring at the hospitals about
their relatives" (qtd. in Warsaw).

In a thin, confused essay, "Prologue to a Dark Journey: The
'Opening' to Poe's 3m” (1972), William Peden attetpts a reading of Pym
as a "proto-type of 20th century Existential non-hero, " moving through
an absurd and illusory world (84). Peden's method is to focus upon
images which metaphorically define Pym as helpless, and his situation as
absurd, such as the sailors' view from the Pegggin of Pym, pinned to its
hull by a spike through the back of his neck: "the body of a man was
seen to be affixed” . beating violently.. . with every movement of the
hull" (1.8). However Peden's key sentences are rendered in vague,
rmantic language that doesn't take us far: m "is a dark voyage from

which there is no return. an existentialist trip fram nothingness to

270
nothingness" (89) .

A richer existential—psychological interpretation is the Poe
chapter of Jerome Loving's recent Lost in the Custom—House (1993), which
reads Poe's psyche and biography into m, "The Imp of the Perverse,"
and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," finding both subjective
psychological projection and objective metaphysical implications. m
is a "literary drunk," a mimesis of an intensifying series of alcoholic
reveries and nightmares, telling a story that does not end but "stops, "
as the authorial persona finally falls into unconsciousness. Loving
notes the pattern in Poe's own life of pramising but false starts: his
pseudonyms, his removals to various cities, his series of desperate
engagements following Virginia's death--Poe's version of "the American
grim; of beginning anew" (63).

He finds a similar pattern in Pym's progression from one boat to
another. As Poe's own plans were ruined, often by uncontrolled
drinking, Pym's projects are wrecked, along with his boats, in
circmetances ttat involve alcohol-influenced behavior and mental
states. In each cycle, motive as a priori design gives way to
uncontrolled "moveIent without motive" (57) . Like the speech of a
drmik.man; language itself gradually loses .its capacity for deductive
order, or to cammnicate "any meaning in our conduct other than the fact
of the conduct itself" (57). Pym is one of Poe's effectively cataleptic
or posthumous narrators resurrected to record the disintegration of
their orderly lives into nightmare, unconsciousness, and finally death.
In the process, a metaphysical reversal is effected: the apparatus of a
priori, putative truth so painstakingly constructed in M's preface,

for instance, is deconstructed as a fiction, while the fantastic

271

delirium to which the narrative devolves is shown to be the true
account: phenomenally, in the context of dream and alcohol, and

metaphysically in the context of the disintegrating order of life

itself .

NOtes
1 See chs. 3 and 5 for discussion of Lawrence on Poe.

2For eample, Stanley Cavell and Joan Dayan, Fables, on the first
point, Gerald Kennedy, Egg, on the second, and John T. Irwin,
Hieroglyphics and Evan Carton on the third.

JPrincipally, Charles Baudelaire, Stephen Mallarmé, Paul Valery,
and Arthur Rimbaud, in addition to Baudelaire. Eliot's "From Poe to
Valery" remains the best analysis, but for a more comprehensive
treatment see Patrick Quinn's The French Face of Poe.

4See ch. two for further discussion of Eliot.
5See ch. three.

6"'I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the
dust within the rock'" (Note.9).

7Tate is discussed in chapters 3 and 4; O'Donnell in chapter 4;
Limon in chapter 5; and Rowe, Irwin, and Miecznikowski below.

8See especially "The Poetic Principle," but also "Philosophy of
Carpositio " and "Letter to B-," all reprinted in Essays and Reviews.

9Rowe's neglect of context would take another form in his later
attetpt to rehistoricize Poe, resulting in anachronistically applying
twentieth-century attitudes about race as a basis for resurrecting the
moral indictment of Poe. See chapter five for discussion of Rowe's
later work and this issue.

10See ch. 5 above for further discussion.
11Smith is the first to identify this essay as a source. He

documents Poe's familiarity with Watson's work in "Usher's Madness and
Poe's Organicism: A Source," American Literature 39 (1967): 379-89.

272

Afterword

Stanley Fish warns that we should be wary of the assumption of
steady advance in enlightenment, that a later reading "sees" more
clearly than an earlier, suggesting the need for a paradigm that
recognizes the variety of political and social forces that determine
change in critical "fashion."1 With that qualification in mind, we
can note ideas about the text that have accrued to provide later studies
with tools at least to penetrate more deeply. The contemporary reviews
display a confusion of expectations about Poe's intent, revealed in
general dissensus and in confusion within individual reviews about
whether they were being gulled or entertained. The late nineteenth- and
early twentieth centuries resisted both Poe and Pym on heretical
grounds, as in it he violates both the moral thematic and formal
aesthetic criteria of the genteel tradition. The
biographical-psychoanalytic Poe scholarship the early New Critics
inherited sustained a mainstream view that his work was contaminated
everywhere by authorial presence: Em was of no interest to them.

Psychological criticism did, however, contribute the enduring
recognition of the dynamics of the unconscious, opening up symbolic
study and multiple levels of signification. When New Critics, always
interested in irony, began to look more at narrative literature, sate
began to notice Em's sophisticated and ironic formal constitution, and

to unlock some of Poe's conscious innovations in narrative

273'

274

technique--though with nothing like consensus. With the emergence of
theories of suhversiveness in American literature, some involved in the
enterprise of American literary historiography found an avenue for Em‘s
entry into that discourse. The tangential activity of locating American
writers in a Western intellectual context began to develop the mystical
and spiritual dimensions which linked M to international Romanticism.

The recognition of Poe's significance for modern literature and
modern ideas, in the nineteen—seventies, advanced Poe to the head of the
canon, and Em to priority in Poe's writing. Its self-referentiality,
in the form of metaphors of scripting that effectively textualize the
landscape, interrogate the nature of representation. At the same time,
its confused claims of authorship and grounds of authority among the
multiple narrators places selfhood in a relative position to language.
Modern readings of Poe recognize that legibility, the very condition for
reading the text, exists as a core theme within it, with basic
epistemological implications.

Because of the accumulated sense of richness in the ways it draws
fram and feeds back literary, social, and intellectual currents of its
environment, M has yielded interesting source and influence studies
and historical readings from the -fifties on. As a result of the recent
resurgence in interest in the historical context, reflected in 'New
Historicism, ' a number of sociological and historical readings have
emerged in the past ten years, and constitute the most definite trend
for the future. Specifically--since we have grouped them nowhere
else--readings by David S. Reynolds, Dana Nelson, G. R. Thompson (1992),
Donald Pease, William C. Spengemann, Gerald Kennedy (1987), John T.

Irwin (1980; 1.992), and John Limon all more or less share

2'75

Saussurean-Derridean recognition of the linguistic constitution of the
subject. But unlike a certain reductive line of overlapping
deconstructionist readings, all also benefit from the post—Althusserian
and Foucauldian insights that the ideological formation of a text cannot
be understood apart from its social context.

In the aggregate this range has provided unuSual depth and
dimension, exposing the many 'faces' of £111, analyzing form at all
levels, and configuring its structure in intriguing, radically different
ways. What emerges is a composite portrait of the heteroglot character
of the text. It is especially "novelistic" in Bakhtin's sense,
reflecting the conflicting voices of society, before the voice of
cultural authority has rendered them into a unified, official account.

A hundred years of source sdholarship and formal analysis has revealed
the Narrative to be an astonishing tapestry of factual and fictive
pretexts representing genres and discourses from across the range of
society. Intellectual analysis has found Poe to be interrogating
aesthetic, epistemological, and theological issues of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries: and to be anticipating modern concepts of identity
and language.

The arrangement of the Egg literature in Chronological and
practical categories, as represented in this summary, runs the risk of
either imputing or imposing by its own structure a greater coherence on
the body of commentary than is actually there. But the possible
benefits outweigh the risk: first, whatever coherence and patterns do
exist could not otherwise be exposed; and second, even with arbitrary
boundaries in my own structuring, it should be a more useful document

for future Poe studies.

276

Closer analysis of the literature reveals dissensus, divergence,
and extremity--a body of criticism that has answered Poe's heteroglot
text with its own heteroglossia. This condition is reflected in EQQL§
Pym.(1992), a collection of essays representing the full range of
approaches and aims, each rarely referencing the others. And this
diversity is representative of every period. It has seemed many things
to many people, with widely varied psychological, historical, formal,
metaliterary, and philosophic readings. Net only have these swung
according to fashion diaChronically, but have coexisted syndhronously.
Even within individual categories, especially the historical and
psychoanalytic, readings have grown too far apart for mudh dialogue.
Thus there are distinct genealogical lines of criticism, with, until
recently, little reference to previous scholarShip outside a particular
line.

Both the variation in the commentary and the characteristics of
individual studies suggest that readers have consistently revealed
uncertainty about how to cope with the play Poe indulges in with every
canponent of the narrative form. With its aberrations, machinations,
lapses into tastelessness, and mixed signals about intended form,
readers have found it to be peculiarly indeterminate in meaning, and
their expectations become confused. we have examined a number of
highly-regarded books on Poe, such as G. R. Thompson's, David
Ketterer's, and Daniel Hbffman's, that hit a wall when and if they deal
with Pym,‘unable to make their thesis fit, and offering instead plot
summaries interlarded with hollow comments. We have seen switches in
approach in midstream, and even conversions to 3 directly opposing

stance (as in Julian Symons). A.number of studies simply conflate

277

extant readings; others hedge their interpretation in language as
evasive and mystical as Pym himself uses, or argue that thematic
interpretation itself is simply a wrongheaded approach for Em, as do
Sydney Moss, Burton Pollin, and Judith Sutherland.

A number of readers have noticed that 3m has a tendency to
undercut the very structures it invites, entrapping the critic within
the text's expanding frame (Sutherland, Robert lee). John Carlos Rowe
best summarizes the mechanism of Pym's evasion of mastery.

Forever holding out the promise of a buried signified, gm
offers a sequence of forged or imitation truths: delivered
messages, deciphered hieroglyphs, a penultimate vision. And
yet, the inability of each successive sign to present its
truth is ironically disclosed, increasingly entangling

any reading in the signifying web it attempts to unravel.
(Custom-House 93)

Richard Kopley, for instance, accepts the Note author's invitation
to solve the puzzles of Pym's narrative with scholarship. He replaces
the latter's studiedly unhelpful "conjectures" with self—generating
linguistic minutiae (over eighty footnotes in one article), and
WW. '3. massive counterplot that collapses of its own weight.
John Barth methodically probes 2m with several mythic and other
structuring principles, only to finally dismiss the action as
"meaningless, dramaturgically," and the book itself, as lacking a
"mainspring" (17) . Like others, he proceeds as Roland Barthes predicts,
in §L, calling up progressively more sophisticated decoding strategies
as each fails.

But there is a mechanism of irony by which 2m evades mastery that

278
has yet to be isolated. The most sophisticated decoding strategy
available to a reader leaves in place uncontained elements that have
ironic significance. Triggered by a formal (or informal) definition,
the text doubles into a parody of the form identified, remaining beyond
the conceptual frame. It is an adventure story, a mythic journey, a
dreamtext manifesting Poe's unconscious, a textualized landscape
conflating word and thing, and it is a parody of each of these. As
Judith Sutherland put it, trying to shake down the text, "worrying it"
like a bone, can cost the critic her "dignity" in the eyes of her
colleagues.

At the same time, even to identify it as an ironic form--a
textualized landscape, or an imaging of the abyss--is to structure it in
such a way as to exclude questions that fran within the text demand
consideration. In focussing upon its ironic form, positive formations
escape the ironists' conceptual framework in any terms other than
negation. But it won't do to simply jettison the undeniable substance
in, for instance, Bonaparte's psychoanalysis, Porte's account of a
guilt—driven soul futilely seeking grace, Spengerann's traveller
striving for total, Emersonian self-authoring. Whatever M "says"
about these projects, it consists of more than to assert their
linguistic determination or humanity's epistemological delimitation.

The problem is not that every essay on Em is reduced before the
writer's own eyes to a worthless parody of criticism. Far more often, a
reading that attempts mastery leaves the inescapable impression that
only a fragment of the text's meaning has been grasped, and that Poe,
with the core meaning, remains in an ironic stance outside the

structure .

279

Even a broadly intertextual work like Irwin's American
Hieroglyphics, drawing in the discursive formations of natural science,
philology, mythology, history, exploration, and metaphysics out of which
m was formed, fails in their overly-narrow application to
to the single, if profound, Romantic postulation that language and human
consciousness originated with the same gesture. It does not account for
equally profound discoveries by others. The findings of Bonaparte, for
instance, in tracing Pym's quest for the maternal, are equally profound,
and one cannot reach the bottam of this line of signification--fram
"Tekeli-li" cry of the polar birds being the title of the play of his
mother's final performance, to the endlessly multiplied symbols of
internal human anatamy on Tsalal, and external beyond it, to e'-.rer more
subtle layers of symbolism. Similarly, St. Armand's identification of
metaphoric alchemical processes in a "drama" of ego formation
brilliantly accounts for the transmutations and grotesquerie in the
text, anomalies no other structure has come close to explaining. Again,
Dana Nelson's excavation of a critique of colonialism played out from
beginning to end also convincingly accounts for much of Em's material.

This suggests not a failure on Irwin's part to read his precedents,
but a hermeneutic failure which he shares more or less with m critics
of every period. Irwin's reading is indeed profound and irresistible,
possibly the best to date, but inclusive as it is, it could hardly
accommodate Bonaparte's, St. Armand's, or Nelson's findings, without
being stretched so widely as to dilute his own original insight. Those
readings that have attempted to conf late the range of sexual,
historical, and philosophical import are coercive and hopelessly tangled

(Eric Mottram, Daniel Hoffman). Perhaps it could be done in a book

280

rather than an article format.

But what is needed is a hermeneutic with looser rules of exclusion
to accommodate an enormous range of play. To formulate this is not the
task of this study, but perhaps it can help. Poe studies is overdue in
providing a reading that can place the range of formal and thematic
significance already established, within a single paradigm. The best
readings deconstruct earlier structural readings like Bonaparte's, only
to then ignore them. But so long as this is continued, we will replicate

her chief fault, that of narrow partiality.

Note

1See "Transmuting the mep."

281

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