[In the following essay, Miecznikowski cites Poe's Eureka as an “apologia” for Pym, noting that the former work justifies the idea that some mysteries cannot be adequately explained.]

Critics over the past twenty to thirty years have been attentive to the similarity in style and theme between the two longest works of Poe's career: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), which may be called a “novel”; and Eureka (1848), which is subtitled “A Prose Poem.”¹⁷ Until more recently, however, what Poe calls in Eureka the “propensity for the continuous—for the analogical” has perhaps led many interpreters of these texts “astray” (299-300). Content to adopt the view that Pym “prefigures” Eureka, readers have often shortsightedly viewed the novel through the poetical essay, thus taking for granted that Poe had both works in mind before or while writing Pym. John Carlos Rowe has proposed an alternative, however, to reading Eureka as, in John Limon's words, “the first intellectual-historical criticism”¹⁸ of Pym, and what Rowe writes of Pym is applicable to Eureka as well: “What critics have considered difficulties and inconsistencies in the text may also be considered self-conscious disruptions of the impulse toward coherent design and completed meaning.”¹⁹ Post-structuralist in his point of view and his conclusions, Rowe nevertheless suggest that it was Poe's conscious intention to disrupt the act of reading (in) Pym. And although such intentionality seems less apparent in both Eureka, texts similarly and, it seems, purposefully illustrate the inadequacy of language to capture what, to use Poe's words in Eureka, “eludes the grasp of the imagination” (285). We might even read Eureka as a kind of explanation or justification of this inadequacy or, more positively, this tendency of language to elude definitive meaning. Moreover, both works seem to come to the same end: a realization of or confrontation with the limits of language, its inability to fully articulate our thoughts or to fully explain our experiences. In these two works, Poe demonstrates that, in Alan C. Golding's words, “certain processes are knowable only as words”—which is to say they are not really “knowable” in any “absolute” or “true” sense, only “intuitively”—“because the processes themselves cannot be fully conceived ….”²⁰ And in the writing of both, as Golding suggests, Poe faced a similar problem: “to approximate the Logos as far as he [could] with the limited language at his disposal” (1). This perhaps explains why Pym ends so abruptly: Pym encounters an image that Poe, its creator, cannot find words to make real for his readers because he himself cannot fully “conceive of” it. Eureka may be viewed as a kind of apologia for Pym to the extent that the “poetical” treatise is an attempt to explain why language sometimes “works” and sometimes doesn’t, or why some “mysteries” are not mysteries at all and why others must remain mysterious.

In order to see the two works as connected in this way, we must first establish their similarity in kind—the nature of each text as the aesthetic production of a poetic imagination—through consideration of Poe's own quasi-metaphysical aesthetic theory.²¹ In his critical reviews and lectures on the subject, Poe sees poetry as an autonomous aesthetic object, apart from its creator (the artist) and the world. Moreover, the experience of beauty is, for Poe, not one of completeness or wholeness but of indeterminacy, transient intensity, through which both poet and reader will apprehend only the briefest “glimpse” of the immortal, or the divine. For Poe, the sole purpose of this artistic representation is to produce a particular unified effect, namely a “pleasurable excitement” which “elevated” the “soul.”²² However, unwilling to grant human beings, grounded as we are in the ordinary world, a kind of transcendental divinity, Poe casts the imagination as a “combinatory” rather than “creative” power through which the artist re-creates, re-forms, re-presents experiences or impressions in some “original” and, more importantly, calculated way. Poetry, then, is not concerned with truth primarily, but with the experience of beauty, the locus of which is the soul. The poem is less a vehicle for the poet's expression of his own profound insight than a provocation to the reader, his audience. Such provocation is the aim of poetry in Poe's aesthetic theory. And this single, intended effect which the poet must strive to elicit, however briefly, could only be accomplished, Poe claims, “step by step … with the rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.”²³ Poe privileges the indeterminate over the ultimate, intensity over eternity, pleasure over truth, even the reader over the poet himself, and grounded aesthetic experience in the artist's “pre-established design”²⁴ calculated to evoke some preconceived effect. For Poe, the artist was a kind of “God-player.”

Poe's aesthetic theory thus indicates the extent to which he sees his own art as both self-conscious and intentional. It also offers justification for the means through which he seeks in both Pym and Eureka to provoke aesthetic response, to incite aesthetic pleasure, through a singular impression upon the “soul”—the intuition or imagination. Ironically, this “single intended effect” may be to undermine the quest for the truth in these texts, for the image which the reader confronts at the end of the narrative of Pym only frustrates the intellect's efforts to find meaning. Similarly, the image of the universe presented in Eureka is, like all speculative inquiry, based on unverifiable intuition. It would seem, then, that aesthetic experience occurs not only in the contemplation of beauty (artistic or natural), but in reflection upon “awful” beauty, those tantalizing images of the “unknown” and the unknowable, images beyond interpretation, for they are not really meant to be “grasped” at all, but “felt.” Poe attempts to blur the line between the imaginable and the comprehensible, however, in the rhetoric and vision of Eureka, which entail the union of beauty and truth and the synonymy of truth and poetry. As the Preface to the text implies, Poe's revision of the relationship between poetry and truth brings “poetic truth” into the realm of beauty; that is, “truth” becomes pleasurable and indefinite, rather than beauty's becoming ultimate and determinate. Poe writes in his Preface to Eureka: “I offer this Book of Truths, not in its character of Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truth; constituting it true.” Truth, then, becomes contingent upon beauty, tied to experience, perception, the ordinary world, to temporality and mortality; it is no longer “ultimate.” Consequently, truth, like beauty, becomes the province of poetry; both the intellect and the soul become the wards of the imagination; and the line between understanding and feeling is blurred. Hence, Poe seeks in Eureka to create a “chain of graduated impression by which alone the intellect of Man can expect to encompass the grandeurs of which I speak, and, in their majestic totality, to comprehend them” (281; Poe's emphasis) through the imagination.

The major philosophical vehicle implicit in Eureka through which Poe seeks to disclose his “secret of the Universe” and which offers us a reading of Pym may be summarized by the term Eros—the life impulse which naturally tends toward death.¹ Poe's claims that all things seek their own end, that difference defines identity, that everything carries with it its own opposite (e.g., Attraction/Repulsion, Unity/Diffusion, Life/Death) are presented and argued in Eureka and dramatized in Pym as a struggle toward an “end” in the dual sense of the word—both purpose and culmination. Both texts suggest that to tend toward “oneness” or “perfection;” whether spiritual or narrative, is to tend toward an “ending” and hence a kind of “death.” This “struggle” is enacted in the character of Pym, in his intermittent desire for “deliverance” from or to death, and in the (albeit oblique) movement of the narrative itself toward “wholeness,” unity, completion, closure, a movement which “ends” abruptly.² The “erotic” impulses of both character and text are thwarted by the narrative personae as well: Pym (the autobiographical narrator himself), his editor (the fictionalized “Mr. Poe” of the prefatory note), and the anonymous editor who writes the final note on the text which undermines its authority.³Pym is a manifestation of the futile “struggle to express,”⁴ evidence of the inevitable “failure” of the attempt due to the inability of language, grounded in the ordinary (natural, temporal) world, to access what can only be imagined. Similarly, Poe (or the speaker) struggles in Eureka to say what he seems to suggest throughout cannot be said definitively because, he argues, it cannot be fully thought. In Eureka, too, authorial intention is apparently subverted by the limits of language.

In both texts, then (regardless of the author's conscious intention), resistance to the disclosure of full meaning becomes the subject of the writing. The “frustration of meaning” recurrent in both texts thus “reflects the inability of meaning … to assert or declare itself.”⁵ In Eureka, however, in contrast perhaps to Pym, the fact that meaning cannot be reduced to language would seem not to diminish it, but instead to lend testimony to its mystery and hence its authority. On the other hand, Poe's repeated observation of the tendency of language to distort and to mystify points to the ultimate impotence of all signification. Full meaning and no meaning are opposite sides of the same coin, and herein lies the potential for a text's duplicity and a reader's misreading. John Carlos Rowe describes the act of writing as an erotic “desire for completion that its own inscription is destined to frustrate” (108) and concludes that in both Pym and Eureka, “the desire for ‘Unity’ operates as part of a generative system for dissemination and the production of differences” (118).⁶

These “differences,” however, create a system of signification that is, to invoke Saussure, “without positive terms,” and by the end of both Pym and Eureka, there are no words adequate to Poe's vision. This is not to say that there is no meaning so that the text leads the reader to a gaping abyss, but rather that, as Joan Dayan has observed in her reading of Eureka, “The tentative progression of words compounds difficulty to prove that no word can be adequate to a thing” (443). The “progression” of signifiers yields a surplus of undecidable meanings. More words fail to deliver the writer to his end (or the reader to the ending). Language and the text, the product of language, are shown to be—in Rowe's words—“self-referential system(s) of signs” (108) through which disclosure of meaning is deferred, for “truth,” if it exists, lies outside the text, outside of language which refers only to itself. If this is the case, language confounds any writer's effort to write his way to the end of a text, for the end(ing) is always inevitable and (in theory) infinitely postponed.⁷ Nevertheless, French critic Jean Ricardou has argued that “No text is more complete than The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, for the fiction it presents points to the end of every text, the ultimate establishment of ‘blank paper defended by whiteness.’”⁸ Ironically perhaps, Ricardou's radical statement masks a mimetic reading of the text which implies that the image which author and character confront at the end of Pym symbolizes the culmination of every reading of every text in the abrupt vacancy of the white page.

There are other perhaps more evident and, upon first reading, apparently less crucial, rhetorical similarities between these two texts as well. In both, Poe's “narrators” make use of sources of information, a gesture toward establishing authority and thus lending “truth” to the text. In Pym, these sources include the various histories and chronicles of Reynolds and other explorers; in Eureka, they are the statements of scientists and theoreticians, particularly Kepler and Laplace. The textual strategies of these two works are so similar, in fact, that they seem almost the inverse of each other in terms of their form. In Pym, narration is frequently interrupted by exposition (on whaling, sailing, or nautical history) while the expository prose of Eureka frequently digresses into narrative or poetical language (the post-dated letter, accounts of the reputations of scientists, Poe's own “soul-reveries” [236], particularly those toward the end of the treatise). And just as Pym's digressive expositions are introduced to readers with a promise that these tracts will shed “light” on what is to come, references to “the sequel” and to “more … later” in Eureka (249, 254; see also 262) lead the reader into a surplus or dearth of signifiers and, ultimately, astray.

Yet another rhetorical tactic which the two works share is the tellingly “false” start of each. The Preface with which Pym “begins” (and which sets up expectations of textual closure) is an apology for any “irresponsibility” on the part of the author, who has relied solely upon “memory” in “detailing events which have had powerful influence in exciting the imaginative faculties.”⁹ The narrator's admission of inadequacy in the novel's Preface is also a major proposition in Eureka, where the “speaker” suggests the impossibility of putting the “marvelous,” the immeasurable, into “mere” words. Eureka begins with a digressive deferral to a letter ostensibly “found in a bottle” and dated 2000 years after the text in which it appears.¹⁰ As a rhetorical strategy, this combination of exposition and narration thus serves to remind the reader of the fictionality of both texts: the extent to which Pym is a “novel” and Eureka a “prose poem.” This link between them—the generic identification as something other than “truth”—further suggests the extent to which they meet Poe's own critical criteria for works of art, that they work on the “soul” (not the intellect) and involve the imagination. Since, as Poe suggests in “The Poetic Principle,” and as Golding eloquently summarizes, “Poetry is the struggle to grasp the sublime in the awareness that it cannot be grasped” (3), Eureka is indeed a “prose-poem,” the primary theme of which is not so much the “truth” of the Universe as its “awe-ful” beauty, its “sublimity.” It is this awe-inspiring sublimity, this glimpse of ultimate “Otherness” perhaps, that both author and character confront at the end of Pym. Poe's rhetoric in both texts moves toward distancing both author and reader from the ordinary world as they (reader, writer, and text) “converge” on an idea that the author cannot put into words but that he is nevertheless driven (to attempt) to disclose.

Thus, both Pym and Eureka, more than any of Poe's critical works, seem to imply an orientation to language that denies the authority of “transcendental signifieds”; there is no speakable, ultimate truth in these texts. Or, to put it another way, ultimate terms (what Kenneth Burke calls “god-terms”), once articulated, are delimited by language; they become part of the temporal process. Either they are no longer “ultimate,” or “ultimate truth” must itself be redefined. In Eureka, Poe betrays a certain skepticism about the capacity of language to express ultimate meanings when he argues that “God,” like “Infinity,” is “by no means the expression of an idea—but an effort at one. It stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception … (and represents) the thought of a thought” (222; Poe's emphasis). It is important to recognize, however, that Poe does not necessarily deny God, only the prospect of our ever truly apprehending or comprehending the being or existence of God when all we have are words (logos). The “truth” upon which we must inevitably base our faith “lies out of the brain of Man” (225; Poe's emphasis), or, we might say, the sublime is beyond the reach of language. Poe's purpose in Eureka is, therefore, defined negatively: to expose “the folly of endeavoring to prove Infinity itself, or even our conception of it” (224). Poe seeks to undermine rather than to advance a claim, for “it is in the act of discontinuing the endeavor of fulfilling (as we think) the idea—of putting the finishing stroke (as we suppose) to the conception—that we overthrow at once the whole fabric of our fancy by resting upon some one ultimate and therefore definite point” (224). Through language, Poe implies, we deceive ourselves that we have found final answers, purpose, meaning. Therefore, he warns, although “in truth” we “prove nothing” by our mere perception, we nonetheless put a premature “end” to intuition, imagination—in short, to thought itself. Poe's “romantic skepticism” is expressed elsewhere in Eureka when he states, “For my part, I am not sure that I speak and see, … that my heart beats and that my soul lives …” (239).¹¹ Such skepticism is intimated, too, in his contemplation of parallax—an important topic in Eureka and an important motif in Pym. For example, the note Augustus straps to Tiger and Pym tears “to pieces,” the death-ship aimlessly adrift, the landslide which threatens to bury Pym and Dirk Peters alive on the island of Tsalal are all instances in which Pym “misreads” his circumstances as a result of his position relative to them, his perspective as a human being in the throes of experience, existence.

The extent to which one's perspective is formed by one's position—physical (spatial) or historical (temporal)—is more generally and perhaps more subtly conveyed in Eureka. For example, Poe writes, “Now, it is clear, not only that what is obvious to one mind may not be obvious to another, but what is obvious to one mind at one epoch, may be anything but obvious, at another epoch, to the same mind” (253). Poe thus explains how it is that even the best minds (presumably even his own) can be wrong over the long term, that epistemés will rupture and be replaced and, consequently, that knowledge is, and must be, periodically “revised.” Poe's epistemological imperative implicitly diminishes truth in some sense, or rather acknowledges its boundaries, for what is contingent is also mutable. Later in Eureka, Poe presents another example of the impact of parallax: “We have no reason to suppose the Milky Way really more extensive than the least of (other) ‘nebulae.’ Its vast superiority in size is but an apparent superiority arising from our position in regard to it … our position in its midst” (276). Poe thus warns against confusing truth with mere appearances or, in this case, imaginings, and intimates the ways in which one's position “in the midst” limits one's knowledge, for it brings certain things to light and leaves others in the shade. This peculiarity of perspective is criticized throughout Pym (most directly perhaps in the ironic pseudo-gloss of the hieroglyph for “to be shady”) and hinted throughout Eureka in the recurrent references, both literal and figurative, to “light” even in the essay's title.

Much has been written to suggest that both Pym and Eureka are examples of Poe's literary hoaxing. In the novel, the prefatory and final notes as well as various aporias throughout the narrative proper have encouraged such criticism.¹² Perhaps, as Paul Rosenzweig has suggested, “Mr. Poe seems all too ready to see everything as a fiction,”¹³ for such textual games are as much a part of the cosmological “prose-poem” as they are of the novel. Eureka's most significant gesture toward fiction, however, is the text's climactic allusion to the Universe as “a plot of God” (292) in which the indefinite pronoun “a” betrays the inability of language—even the Logos—to express ultimate singularity, oneness, unity, truth. Hence in Eureka, Poe paradoxically implies that there is more than one universe, hence more than one truth. The text's climactic image of “universal” plurality within ultimate “unity” provocatively suggests that there may even be more than one God:

[In] the still more awful Future … the worlds of that day will be immeasurably greater than our own. Then, indeed, amid unfathomable abysses, will be glaring unimaginable suns. But all this will be merely a climactic magnificence forboding the great End. Of this End the new genesis described can be but a very partial postponement. While undergoing consolidation, the clusters themselves … rushing towards their own general centre … and … with their spiritual passion for oneness … flash, at length, into a common embrace. The inevitable catastrophe is at hand.

(304)

There is a sense in which the visionary “dénouement,” the end of space and time which Poe proposes in this passage, intimates a “plot” of God against his own Creation.¹⁴ Reference to “abysses,” to “the great End,” and to “catastrophe” have prompted a number of apocalyptic readings of the text. G. R. Thompson has argued, for example, that in Eureka Poe envisions the universe as a “work of art which refers to nothing outside itself—indeed, which is a façade for the Nothingness from which it is evoked” (299). What Thompson seems to miss, however, is that Poe does not himself equate “unity” with “nothingness.” Moreover, Poe anticipates and confronts such criticism when he writes: “In sinking into Unity, [the universe] will sink at once into that Nothingness which, to all finite perception, Unity must be—into that Material Nihility from which alone we can conceive it to have been evoked—to have been created by the Volition of God” (306; Poe's emphasis). As he does throughout the text of Eureka, Poe argues here that the kind of originative “nothingness” which he posits as the creative impetus of the world is simply and radically incomprehensible to human beings, who must resort to what truths we can conceive when faced with the “unfathomable.”¹⁵ Poe reasons that “nothingness” is the word we give to the radically unknown and attribute to it all of the negativity we associate with our image of absolute nothingness. Thus, in Eureka, and perhaps in Pym as well, “Poe takes cosmic contraction, decay, and involution and applies it to our striving after the infinite,”¹⁶ and in the climactic moments of both texts, the impotence of “plot” and “plotter” (play and player) is revealed.

Thompson's criticism of Poe betrays a hope for more than Nothingness beyond the limits of language and masks a fear that that is all there is. But what Thompson fears is of his own (not Poe's) creation, and while both Pym and Eureka perhaps inspire such fear, both also support such hope. Although very different in their means, both Pym and Eureka come to similarly startling but uniquely, albeit perversely, optimistic ends. Pym does, after all, survive his “descent” into opaque whiteness, and Poe envisions the universe “descending” into ultimate oneness. Moreover, while both texts illustrate the failure of the human struggle towards the infinite, both imply that such striving is what makes us human; it is, on some level at least, why both texts—and hundreds of others—continue to engender so much conversation about what they might mean. The quest for the infinite, the radically unknowable and incomprehensible, is the enactment of Eros and the (re)affirmation of our humanity, which inevitably runs up against the limits of language. Herein lies both our hope and our fear—hope that we will in time come to know our own ignorance, fear that time will confirm what (we think) we know. Poe's own hope and fear is perhaps betrayed by his problematical allusion to the immortality of Eureka when he writes in the Preface, “What I propound here is true:—therefore it cannot die: or, if it be now trodden down so that it die, it will rise again to the Life Everlasting’” (Poe's emphasis). Poe thus seems to claim for his text what he could not claim for its subject or its author. But the immortality of the text may be just another “plot” against the reader, another promise which its author hopes and fears will be fulfilled. On the other hand, Eureka, in contrast to Pym, may be Poe's sincerest piece of plotting, for in it, his own “God-playing” goads even the writer himself into a seemingly genuine belief in both the “beautiful” and “awful” truth of the universe which his work of art could only struggle and ever fail to express.

Notes

1. At the risk of oversimplicity, Eros will be defined as the name given by thinkers from Plato to Freud to that drive or instinct toward the ultimately conflicting goals of self-preservation and yielding to otherness for self-fulfillment, accomplished through two contrary but complicitous movements: one inward, one outward—or in the language of Eureka, one centripetal toward unity, one centrifugal toward diffusion. In Eureka, these movements are analogous to the tension between the creative and the destructive impulses of the Universe. In “Mesmeric Revelation,” an earlier pseudo-scientific “interview” of sorts, Poe equates “the ultimate life,” death, and “the full design” (“Mesmeric Revelation,” in The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, pp. 130-31).

2. In “‘Dust Within the Rock’: The Phantasm of Meaning in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Studies in the Novel, 14 (Summer 1982), 137-51, Paul Rosenzweig points to three “endings,” none of which provides textual closure: the narrative's seemingly apocalyptic ending from which Pym escapes, the “Note” which follows and which itself ends cryptically, the “missing chapters” alluded to in the Note. While the final note, as we expect, “at first seems further to reinforce the novel's movement toward meaning” (p. 138), all of these “psuedo-endings” mislead and mystify rather than lend clarity and closure to the novel.

3. Rosenzweig discusses the ways in which the Preface and the editorial notes appended to the front and back of Pym undermine narrative authority by “function[ing] ironically in exactly the opposite manner from [their] purported aim of clarification” (“‘Dust Within the Rock,’” p. 140).

4. Joan Dyan, “The Analytic of the Dash: Poe's Eureka,” Genre, 16 (Winter 1983), 458; further references are cited in the text.

5. Rosenzweig, “‘Dust Within the Rock,’” p. 140. As Rosenzweig contends, “The novel thus establishes both in its themes and its structure a pattern of expectations continually frustrated—a pattern which undermines not only the reader's sense of an ending or a particular meaning, but of the very concept of endings and meanings, for while tempting the reader to work toward establishing meaning on several levels, the novel never allows any one reality or continuity to establish itself” (p. 142; his emphasis).

6. Poe articulates a similar view in Eureka where he describes the universe as engaged in “a diffusion from Unity … involv[ing] a tendency to return to unity” (p. 228). For Poe, the universe, which began in “oneness” and which subsequently diffused into differences, tends toward its original sameness or singularity, what Alan C. Golding describes as a return to the Logos, “the original One Word which contains all words” (“Reductive and Expansive Language,” p. 1).

7. As J. Gerald Kennedy suggests in his reading of Pym, “Deception constitutes both the medium and the message: the reader's encounter with a treacherous text mirrors the narrator's encounter with a duplicitous world, and both experiences point toward a realization that man's search for truth and meaning culminates not in transcendent harmony but in cognitive confusion” (“The Invisible Message: The Problem of Truth in Pym,” in The Naiad Voice: Essays on Poe's Satiric Hoaxing, ed. Dennis W. Eddings (Port Washington, NY: Associated Faculty Press, 1983), p. 124 [rpt. in J. Gerald Kennedy, Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 145-76].

8. Jean Ricardou, “‘The Singular Character of the Water,’” trans. Frank Towne, Poe Studies, 9 (June 1976), 4.

9. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, ed. Harold Beaver (London: Penguin, 1975, rpt. 1980), p. 43; further references are cited in the text. For an overview of Pym criticism, see Douglas Robinson, “Reading Poe's Novel: A Speculative Review of Pym Criticism, 1950-1980,” Poe Studies, 15 (December 1982), 47-54.

10. Poe's theories and insights in both Pym and Eureka may have their source in “MS. Found in a Bottle,” one of Poe's most popular early stories for which he won $50 in a fiction contest in 1833. The text is full of ideas and images which seem to have found their way into his later, longer works, both literary and critical. For instance, the narrator claims, “I shall never—I know that I shall never—be satisfied with regard to the nature of my conceptions,” voicing a certain skepticism about the limits of knowledge, a skepticism which the reader of Pym and the author of Eureka are persuaded to share (“MS. Found in a Bottle,” in The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, p. 7.).

11. The phrase “romantic skepticism” is taken from G. R. Thompson's essay “Unity, Death, and Nothingness—Poe's ‘Romantic Skepticism,’” PMLA, 85 (March 1970), 297-300.

12. See, for example, J. Gerald Kennedy, “The Invisible Message: The Problem of Truth in Pym”; Paul Rosenzweig, “‘Dust Within the Rock’: The Phantasm of Meaning in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym”; and G. R. Thompson's Introduction to Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe.

13. “‘Dust Within the Rock,’” p. 148.

14. Poe writes, “the considerations through which, in this Essay, we have proceeded step by step, enable us clearly and immediately to perceive that Space and Duration are one” (Eureka, p. 291; Poe's emphasis).

15. As Paul Rosenzweig asks with regard to the last line of Pym (“And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow”), “Is it Nothing? Or Everything?” (“‘Dust Within the Rock,’” p. 144). We might ask the same question about Poe's vision in Eureka.

16. Dayan, “The Analytic of the Dash: Poe's Eureka,” p. 34.

17. Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe, in The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Harold Beaver (London: Penguin, 1976, rpt. 1987), p. [205]; further references are cited in the text. For some interesting discussion of Eureka, see Richard P. Benton, ed., Poe as Literary Cosmologer: Studies on “Eureka”: A Symposium (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1975).

18. John Limon, “How to Place Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym in Science-Dominated Intellectual History, and How to Extract It Again,” North Dakota Quarterly, 51 (1983), 33.

19. John Carlos Rowe, “Writing and Truth in Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Glyph, 2 (1977), 104; further references are cited in the text. [Rpt. in John Carlos Rowe, Through the Custom-House: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and Modern Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982).]

20. Alan C. Golding, “Reductive and Expansive Language: Semantic Strategies in Eureka,” Poe Studies, 11 (June 1978), 3; further reference is cited in the text.

21. For an understanding of Poe's aesthetic theory, see especially “Letter to B****” (1831), “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), and “The Poetic Principle” (1850), in G. R. Thompson, ed., Essays and Reviews: Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Library of America, 1984). For Poe's review of Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales, see Robert L. Hough, ed., Literary Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965), pp. 133-41. For insight into the philosophical underpinnings of Poe's aesthetic theory, see Joseph J. Moldenhauer, “Murder as a Fine Art: Basic Connections Between Poe's Aesthetics, Psychology, and Moral Vision,” PMLA, 83 (May 1968), 284-97; and Glenn A. Omans, “‘Intellect, Taste, and the Moral Sense’: Poe's Debt to Immanuel Kant,” Studies in the American Renaissance, ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: Twayne, 1980), pp. 123-68.

22. Poe writes, “That pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful. When, indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect—they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul—not of intellect, or of heart—upon which I have commented, and which is experienced in consequence of contemplating ‘the beautiful’” (“The Philosophy of Composition,” Essays and Reviews: Edgar Allan Poe, p. 16; Poe's emphasis).

23. Thompson, Essays and Reviews, p. 15.

24. “Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales,” in Literary Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe, p. 136.