The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is Edgar Allan Poe's only complete novel, published in 1838.

The work relates the tale of the young Arthur Gordon Pym who stows away aboard a whaling ship called Grampus. Various adventures and misadventures befall Pym including shipwreck, mutiny and cannibalism. The story starts out as a fairly conventional adventure at sea, but it becomes increasingly strange and hard to classify in later chapters, involving religious symbolism and the Hollow Earth.

Plot summary

On board the Ariel

Arthur Gordon Pym was born on the island of Nantucket, famous for its fishing harbor and whaling. His best friend, Augustus Barnard, is the son of a captain of a whaling ship. One night, the two get drunk and decide, on Augustus's whim, to take advantage of the breeze and sail on Pym's dinghy, the Ariel. The breeze, however, is the beginnings of a storm. Due to his drunkenness, Augustus collapses in the dinghy, obliging Pym, who has only a cursory knowledge of navigating, to take control of the dinghy. There was no time to right the boat before capsizing, but a whaling ship, returning to Nantucket, sees them and saves them. Arthur and Augustus are brought back to land, and they decide to keep this escapade a secret from their parents.

On board the Grampus

This adventure does not dissuade Pym from sailing adventures; rather, his imagination is ignited by the experience. His interest is further fueled by the tales of the sailor's life that Augustus tells him. Pym decides to follow Augustus on board the Grampus, a whaling vessel that Augustus's father is shortly going to take on a voyage to the southern seas. Arthur's family refuses to give him permission to join the expedition, so he decides that with the help of Augustus, he will secretly board the Grampus, which leaves in June 1827.

An encounter with his grandfather gives Pym the cold sweats, though he succeeds in persuading his grandfather that he had confused his grandson with another. Pym, disguised as a sailor, boards the Grampus and secures himself in a hiding spot his friend had laid out for him. Pym will remain there until the whaling ship is on the high sea and will not show himself until it is too late for the boat to turn back. Augustus also smuggled Tiger, Pym's faithful dog, on board.

As the days pass, Pym is overcome by a comatose-like numbness, seemingly due to the contaminated atmosphere, and does not realize when his provisions arrive to their term. He yearns to leave his confinement, and is ready to succumb to despair when Tiger comes to his rescue. However, a letter attached to Tiger, written in blood, warns Pym to remain hidden, his life depends on it.

Some time later, Augustus finally rejoins his friend and explains the mysterious message, as well as his delay in retrieving his friend: a mutiny has erupted on the whaling ship. Part of the crew was slaughtered by the mutineers, while another group, including Augustus's father, has abandoned the ship. Augustus survives because one of the mutineers, Dirk Peters, was a friend to him, and begins regretting his part in the mutiny.

Dirk, Pym, and Augustus hatch a plan to make the ship return: during a storm, Pym, whom the mutineers do not know of, will dress himself in the clothes of a recently-dead sailor and will pass for a ghost. Taking advantage of the confusion that will follow, Peters and Augustus, helped by Tiger, will subdue the rebellious sailors. Everything goes according to the plan, and soon the three men are masters of the whaling ship: the mutineers are killed or thrown overboard, with the exception of one man, Richard Parker, left alive to help them run the vessel.

However Augustus receives injuries to his arm, and the storm breaks the mast, tears the sails and floods the ship. All four men barely survive the storm after days of hurricane by lashing themselves to the ship. Half of the bridge is underwater and the cabins are flooded. The men begin to lose hope as well as strength when they see a ship off to the distance coming straight at them. When it gets nearer to the boat however, they see that it is covered in corpses and believe the sailors had perished from some form of infectious plague. The men's hopes continue to diminish and their famine increases. Parker then suggests that one of them should be killed for food for the others to live. Pym is against this but in the end he submits and they draw straws to see who will be offered up, Parker is chosen and is killed and eaten by the remaining three men. Afterwards, Pym remembers hiding an axe after the recapturing of the ship and with this they are able to get into the hold and procure food, as well as wine. Augustus gets ill from his wounds and shortly another storm hits and washes away the food. Soon after Augustus dies, and another storm hits capsizing the boat, where Peters and Pym float on the upturned boat, surrounded by sharks. When it appears that they both will perish they are rescued by a ship out of Boston called the Jane Guy.

On board the Jane Guy

Peters and Pym are collected by the Jane Guy, a ship from Liverpool that is going to hunt sea calves and do some business in the South Seas. Pym works out that on board the Grampus, they drifted some twenty five degrees to the south. Pym studies up on the islands around the Cape of Good Hope - he is particularly interested in the social structures of penguins and their nests and how they keep their territory against the albatrosses. Fascinated by this voyage of discovery, Pym urges the captain to push further south towards the Antarctic regions that are unexplored.

They cross a pack ice barrier and find themselves in an open sea, close to the pole, with a surprisingly mild climate. In this Antarctic ocean, they come upon the island of Tsalal, inhabited by a large number of black natives led by their chieftain Too-Wit. The colour white is completely alien to them and scares the natives, since nothing white can be found on Tsalal. (Even the teeth of the natives are black.) Nevertheless, the relationships with the white crew of the Jane Guy are friendly at the beginning, and Too-Wit and the captain of the Jane Guy start trading.

Yet, on the eve of the Jane Guy's departure, the crew of the ship is led into an ambush in a narrow gorge by Too-Wit. All of the whites, with the exception of Pym and Dirk Peters, perish; Pym and Peters later witness the Jane Guy being captured and burned by the natives before it explodes, presumably from its gunpowder stores being ignited.

Tsalal and further south

Pym and Peters hide for some time on the island in the mountains that surround the place of the ambush. They discover a set of labyrinthine passages in the mountain and marks on the rock walls, but can't agree whether these are formed naturally or by humans.

When they run out of food once more, Pym and Peters steal a boat from the natives and make a narrow escape from the island, taking one of the natives prisoner.

The small boat is led further south by a current of water of constantly increasing temperature and strange, milky substance. After several days, a rain of ashes is falling down on them, and finally the boat approaches a huge cataract of fog or steam ahead of them, which splits open just before Pym and Peters reach it. In the cleft, a huge, shrouded figure of complete whiteness appears.

Here the novel ends abruptly. A short postscript, ostensibly written by the book's editors, compares the shapes of the labyrinth and the wall marks to Arabian and Egyptian letters and hieroglyphs with meanings of "Shaded", "White", and "Region to the South".

Analysis

One of Poe's least accessible works, Arthur Gordon Pym has until now defied a universally accepted interpretation. The construction from two more or less disconnected parts and the abrupt ending seem to be in contrast to Poe's theories of careful and meticulous story composition.^{citation needed}

Unlike previous sea voyage tales that Poe wrote (e.g., "MS. Found in a Bottle"), Pym is undertaking this trip on purpose.^[1] It has been suggested that the journey is about establishing a national American identity as well as discovering a personal identity.^[2] This self-discovery would relate to Poe himself: The novel begins with Arthur Gordon Pym, a name similar to Edgar Allan Poe, departing from Edgartown, Massachusetts on Martha's Vineyard. Interpreted this way, the protagonist is actually sailing away from himself, or his ego.^[3]

One thread of critical analysis of this tale focuses on the racist implications of Poe's plot and imagery; see, for example, Lynn Vaughn's essay "Sensationalism and The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym of Nantucket".^[4] A notable proponent of this thread is Toni Morrison in her work "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination", published in 1992.

Sources

In order to present the tale as an authentic exploration, Poe used a number of the travel journals that proliferated in that era.^[5] Poe may have been inspired, at least in part, by Jeremiah N. Reynolds, who had recently made a report to Congress on a proposed expedition to the South Seas^[6] on April 3, 1836, called, An Address on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition to the Pacific Ocean and the South Seas, reprinted a year later with a critical introduction by Poe.^[7] Poe actually used about seven hundred words of Reynolds' address in Chapter XVI, almost half the length of the chapter.^[8]

Poe also used the journals of Captain James Cook and A Narrative of Four Voyages (1832) by Benjamin Morrell, of which Poe copies out several passages, most notably those to do with hunting the sea-cow.^[9] A Narrative of Four Voyages may have given Poe the idea of the summarized title of his novel.^[10]

Another important source for Poe is two works including the theories of John Cleves Symmes, Jr. on the hollow earth: an adventure novel Symzonia published in 1820 by Adam Seaborne, probably a pseudonym for Symmes himself,^[11] and the work of a "citizen of the United States" entitled Symmes Theory of the Concentric Spheres, published in 1826.^[12] These works had already served Poe when he wrote, in 1831 "MS. Found in a Bottle", where already there was a question of a voyage to the vast south and a gulf instead of a south pole. Another influence on Pym is The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge.^[13]

Literary significance and reception

Contemporary reviews for The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket were generally unfavorable overall. Fifteen months after its publication, it was reviewed by Lewis Gaylord Clark, a fellow author who carried on a substantial feud with Poe. His review printed in The Knickerbocker said the book was "told in a loose and slip-shod style, seldom chequered by any of the more common graces of composition." Clark went on, "This work is one of much interest, with all its defects, not the least of which is that it is too liberally stuffed with 'horrid circumstances of blood and battle.'"^[14] A review in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine (possibly William Burton himself) criticized its excessive gruesome detail, borrowed descriptions of geography, and errors in nautical information. The reviewer considered it a literary hoax and called it an "impudent attempt at humbugging the public" and regretted "Mr. Poe's name in connexion with such a mass of ignorance and effrontery."^[15] H. G. Wells noted that "Pym tells what a very intelligent mind could imagine about the south polar region a century ago".^[16] Jorge Luis Borges praised the novel on many occasions, classing it as "Poe's greatest work".[1]

Publication history

The mystery

Cooperating with his editor, Poe presented his novel to the general public as an authentic travelogue, and Pym as a real person who had explored the region that Jeremiah Reynolds was exploring. It was difficult for the author and his American editor to convince a public that had been able to read the first chapters of this story in the Messenger, where they had appeared under the signature of Poe, that these had in reality been dictated by Pym himself. In the preface of the novel, composed seemingly at the last moment (dated June 1838), the narrator of the preface, Pym declares that the reason why earlier editions had been under the byline of Poe was because it was thought by the chief editor of the Messenger that no one would believe his story, and the editor had persuaded Poe to transcribe Pym's story, publish it under Poe's name, and initially pass it off as a work of fiction. But, Pym explains, many readers wrote to the Messenger saying that they did not believe it was only a fiction. Convinced and reassured by these reactions, Pym then decided to tell the tale of his adventures in its entirety. This deception has seemed to work sometimes: several English and American critics received the novel as if it had been an authentic travelogue.^[17]

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was published in England by George Palmer Putnam. Putnam bought Poe's manuscript without reading through to the last page, hoping the book would capitalize on the public interest in Sir John Franklin and his expedition to the Arctic. Putnam apparently believed the story of Pym was true, as Poe intended to present it. When the book was published in London in particular, it received harsh reviews and comments that Putnam, the "Yankee," was trying to dupe British readers. Putnam vowed never to publish another work without reading it in its entirety.^[18] When it was published in England, the editors omitted the last paragraph of the novel, judged obviously too unlikely. They added a note at the end of the preface, notifying the readers of the unfinished nature of the work due to Pym's death.

A novel for the general public

Poe profited from the advice given by Harper in his letter of 1836; The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is a response to the three justifications of the editor that motivated his refusal to publish Poe's stories.^[19]

So, according to the objection that the previous publication in the Messenger would be harmful to the success of the work, Poe replies by creating an essentially unedited text: two parts only of Pym (That correspond to chapters I-IV of the novel^[20]) appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger (January and February 1837 editions) to entice a reader to buy the novel.

Allusions/references from other works

In 1897 French author Jules Verne published The Sphinx of the Ice Fields, a sequel to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,^[21] the two-volume novel explores the adventures of the Halbrane as its crew search for answers to what became of Pym. Translations of this text are sometimes titled An Antarctic Mystery or The Mystery of Arthur Gordon Pym.

Poe's novel was also an influence on H. P. Lovecraft, whose 1936 story At the Mountains of Madness follows similar thematic direction and borrows the cry tekeli-li from The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

Yann Martel named a character in his Booker Prize winning novel Life of Pi after Poe's fictional Richard Parker, and other real life Richard Parkers who were all coincidentally involved with cannibalism, shipwrecks and having the same name (see below). As Yann Martel said "So many Richard Parkers had to mean something." So many Richard Parkers have apparently confused Martel, who in interviews has inadvertently transferred the cannibalism from the 1836 Francis Spaight shipwreck (where there was no Richard Parker aboard) to the 1846 Francis Spaight shipwreck (where there was a Richard Parker lost). ^[22]

Georges Perec's 1969 novel A Void, notable for not containing a single letter e, contains an e-less rewriting of Poe's "The Raven" that is attributed to Arthur Gordon Pym in order to avoid using the multiple e's found in Poe's name. ^[23]

References

^ Hoffman, Daniel. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972. ISBN 0807123218 p. 260
^ Meyers, Jeffrey. Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy. New York: Cooper Square Press, 1991. p. 297-8. ISBN 0815410387
^ Hoffman, Daniel. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972. ISBN 0807123218 p. 260
^ McNair Scholars Journal Volume 1
^ Cf. Claude Richard, notes on Arthur Gordon Pym, in Edgar Allan Poe..., coll. bouquins, p. 1328
^ Kennedy, J. Gerald. "A Brief Biography" in A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. p. 38 ISBN 0195121593
^ Poe's Introduction
^ Tynan, Daniel. "J. N. Reynold's Voyage of the Potomac: Another Source for The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" from Poe Studies, vol. IV, no. 2, December 1971, pp. 35–37. Available online at www.eapoe.org
^ Morrell Table of Contents
^ The full title of Morrell's work is: Narrative of Four Voyages to the South Sea, North and South Pacific Ocean, Chinese Sea, Ethiopic and Southern Atlantic Ocean, Indian and Antarctic Ocean Comprising Critical Surveys of Coasts and Islands, with Sailing Directions, and an Account of Some New and Valuable Discoveries, including the Massacre Islands, where thirteen of the author's crew were massacred and eaten by cannibals (cited by R. Asselineau, op. cit., p. 13)
^ Symzonia
^ Symmes Introduction
^ Roger Asselineau (op. cit., p. 15)
^ Moss, Sidney P. Poe's Literary Battles: The Critic in the Context of His Literary Milieu. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963. p. 89
^ Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991. pp. 143, 157 ISBN 0060923318
^ Frank, Frederick S. and Anthony Magistrale. The Poe Encyclopedia. Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut and London, England, (1997). ISBN 031327768 p. 372
^ Cf. Patrick Quinn, art. cit., p.152
^ Tebbel, John. A History of Book Publishing in the United States - Volume I: Creation of an Industry (1630-1865). New York City: R. R. Bowker Co., 1972. ISBN 0835204898 p. 305-6
^ The relationship between cause and effect between the refusal letter of Harper and the composition of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is discussed by specialists; Claude Richard writes that "it seems that because he was put to the challenge to attack a new genre that Poe undertook writing Arthur Gordon Pym" (notes on The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, op. cit., p. 1328). More adamantly, Roger Asselineau writes for his part that it is "clear that The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is an order work." (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Sapwood, preface, p. 12)
^ The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
^ Tresch, John. "Extra! Extra! Poe invents science fiction!" as collected in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Kevin J. Hayes. Cambridge University Press, 2002. p. 117. ISBN 0521797276
^ Yann Martel on tigers, cannibals and Edgar Allan Poe - News - Canongate Home
^ Perec, Georges. A Void. Translated by Gilbert Adair. London: The Harvill Press, 1995. p.108. ISBN 1860460984

Contents

Plot summary

On board the Ariel

On board the Grampus

On board the Jane Guy