SOURCE: “Poe/Script: The Death of the Author in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” in New Orleans Review, Vol. 14, No. 3, Fall, 1987, pp. 51-60.

[In the following essay, Pahl explores Poe's questioning of the idea of selfhood in Pym, as evidenced in his handling of the narrator.]

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is a text riddled with mysteries, not the least of which involves Pym's seeming annihilation at the story's end:

And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us [Pym and Dirk Peters]. 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 figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.¹

Most of the commentary on this passage centers exclusively on the meaning of the “shrouded human figure” and the “perfect whiteness” into which Pym voyages, all to the purpose of bringing a sense of closure, of determinacy, to what is represented as an open-ended text.² Unsatisfied with the abrupt ending of Pym's Narrative—an ending which leaves much to be answered in regard to the hero's fate—critics have attempted to close the gap in Poe's text with a kind of symbolizing that, depending on the theoretical orientation, has either religious or psychoanalytic implications. Edward H. Davidson, for instance, argues that the whiteness at the end of Pym's journey signals the culmination of Pym's ever-increasing moral and spiritual awareness; indeed “the blankness of eternal mystery engulfs him the moment he faces the white light of revelation.”³ Offering a Freudian interpretation, Marie Bonaparte reads the final scene as symbolic of Pym's return to the womb, with the “perfect whiteness” of the human figure representing the mother's milk.⁴ Both these readings point out that Pym's death coincides precisely with his greatest self-discovery, or his discovery of his true self (from the psychoanalytic viewpoint Pym is returning to his origins): his death is a rebirth.

But in attempting to locate the meaning of the white mist that Pym encounters, critics have in a sense repeated Pym's quest for ultimate truth and knowledge. Not that the critic must fall to the same disastrous fate as Pym, but whatever “knowledge” he comes upon must necessarily prove as fruitless, as impossible to possess. Poe may well anticipate his readers—his deciphers—insofar as his text, by creating a gap or space into which (let us say) the reader must voyage, makes ironic the very idea of bringing the text to a successful closure—with a correct meaning. For the “white light of revelation” is really no revelation at all; it simply marks the absence around which the reader is allowed to construct his own interpretive discourse, filling in the blank space with his own sort of fiction. What Poe's text accomplishes here is not to represent an ultimate knowledge of the self, but rather to lay down the conditions upon which such a knowledge is possible: thus to see how “truth”—and more specifically, the truth of the self—is not discovered, but invented. In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym Poe challenges whatever authenticity, or truth value, the narrator might lend to his narrative by putting in question the narrator's self—that is, his ability to stand outside his own system of representation, total and present to himself. What is particularly interesting about Pym is that it is not simply the narrator but the author himself who becomes the chief vehicle through which Poe explores questions of selfhood and self-presence. What precisely is authorship? And how, at the same time it is supposed to authenticate a given text, does it jeopardize its own authority?

It is perhaps in the final scene of Pym that the problem of authorship—and hence of the authenticity of the entire text—becomes most transparent, for here we are made to confront the paradoxical situation of an author narrating the story of his own demise. That the story may be a hoax in this respect has become the opinion of more than a few critics; but Poe's concern with the problem of authorship becomes too insistent throughout the text for us to reduce the story to a mere hoax—and so we ought better see Pym's death as a dramatization of this problem.⁵ We may well relate Poe's investigation of “the author” to Michel Foucault's explanation of the relationship that exists between writing and death. In his essay “What is an Author?” Foucault argues that in our modern culture

Writing has become linked to sacrifice, even to the sacrifices of life: it is now a voluntary effacement which does not need to be represented in books, since it is brought about in the writer's very existence. … That is not all, however: this relationship between writing and death is also manifested in the effacement of the writing subject's individual characteristics. Using all the contrivances that he sets up between himself and what he writes, the writing subject cancels out the signs of his particular individuality. As a result, the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing.⁶

That Pym's death at the story's end may be related to his disappearance in writing—to the death of the author—becomes more plausible once we realize that “narrative authority” is set forth as a problem from the very beginning of Poe's text—in the Preface. Here Poe raises the question of authorship by going so far as to call attention to his own activity of writing a work of fiction: which is to say he names himself as the fictional author-character, “Mr. Poe, lately editor of the Southern Literary Messenger,” who also shares in the writing of Pym's Narrative (43). Inscribing himself within the scene of his own writing, Poe thus dramatizes his own disappearance, his “death,” in writing; he subverts his own self-presence. Who, then, can be said to author the text if no clear demarcation exists between the writer and the written? And if “author” at once implies the origin of the work, who then stands before the text, originating and authorizing it? Such questions are implicitly posed by the Preface, where Pym claims to have entrusted the task of writing part of the narrative to Mr. Poe, mainly because he lacks the confidence in his own writing to convince very many readers that the “marvelous” events he wishes to report are true. Drawing up, “in his own words, a narrative of the earlier portion of my [Pym's] adventures,” Poe publishes it in the Southern Messenger, “under the garb of fiction” (44). Ironically, the fiction is taken by the public as fact, and Pym decides thereupon to complete the narrative which Poe began, believing now that “the facts of my narrative would prove of such a nature as to carry with them sufficient evidence of their own authenticity” (44).

A problem of authorship arises, however, when we try to distinguish between Poe's portion of the narrative and Pym's. Though Pym, in the last lines of the Preface, assures us that “the difference in point of style will be readily perceived,” there seems to be no detectable change in style throughout the narrative—thus making impossible any attempt to reach a clear understanding of who is writing when, or who the real author is (45). It is true, as several critics have noted, that Pym is a sort of double of Poe, his name even being reminiscent of Poe's; but more than a simple hoax—a game that Poe is playing with his readers—the doubling of Poe and Pym serves as a point of departure for the text's exploration into the meaning of authorship, and the consequences that writing holds for any epistemological pursuits—that is, for any search for truth and knowledge.⁷ For Pym's journey, as we learn, is as much a verbal one as it is a physical one; it should therefore not be surprising that his whole movement toward origins, truth, presence—what Davidson calls the “white light of revelation”—is undermined by the very fact of his authorship.

The whole structure of Pym may be said to indicate a movement toward origins, as the hero's journey takes him not only to the source of himself—as already related by Marie Bonaparte's analysis of the womb motif—but also to the corresponding beginnings of man: among a tribe of islanders too geographically isolated to be corrupted by civilization. At the island of Tsalal, near the South Pole, Pym fulfills his earlier romantic visions of traveling to “some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown” (57). Here, far from the conventional world of his New England home, Pym encounters “nature” itself—which is to say, that realm which Melville later envisions as being free from the “world of lies.”⁸ What seems to be Pym's quest for truth and knowledge, for a certain essentiality in life, is apparently fulfilled by this pure, natural, unblemished landscape. It is a veritable heart of darkness into which Pym enters, where man is reduced to his most primitive state. The “savages” are described as “about the ordinary stature of Europeans, but of a more muscular and brawny frame. The complexion (was) a jet black, with thick and long wooly hair. They were clothed in skins of an unknown black animal, shaggy and silky …” (189). An uncultured people, the tribesmen of Tsalal are represented as being pre-linguistic, the sounds they utter—such as Anamoo-moo and Lama-Lama, and other such cries—resembling what Marie Bonaparte has insightfully identified as “infant babble” (338). To be sure, infants, according to romantic doctrine, are of all human beings most closely associated with the natural; but if Poe's text does not provide enough evidence to confirm that the Tsalalians' speech derives from the mouths of babes, there is a more explicit suggestion that their form of communication comes precisely from nature itself. For instance, when the Tsalalians confront anything that is colored white—such as the white carcass of “the strange animal with scarlet teeth and claws”—they begin shouting “Tekeli-li,” a sound which we later discover is likewise produced by the “gigantic and pallidly white birds” that issue from the vapory white curtain that Pym encounters in the final scene (219). Also, when the captive islander Nu-Nu speaks the names Tsalal and Tsalemon, which designate the island and the island king respectively, he makes “a prolonged hissing sound … which was precisely the same with the note of the black bittern that we [Pym and his party] had eaten upon the summit of the hill” (236).

Dominated by the “voice” of nature, the world of Tsalal must be said to exist outside of language altogether: in a realm that is uncorrupted by another of man's “lies,” or artifices. According to Saussurian linguistics, language is constituted only within a system of differences, and identity can only be formulated in terms of difference.⁹ But on the island of Tsalal, which seems to elude the conventions of language, what we see is a society immersed in sameness, where the uniform appearance of the island and of the islanders allows for few distinctions. Complementing the region further along in Pym's journey, where nothing that is not white is to be found, Tsalal is represented as predominantly black. The complexions of the islanders, as already mentioned, are “jet black” (189); the domestic animals include hog-like creatures with black wool, and even a black albatross (196); the islanders known as Wampoos live in “black skin palaces” (197); even the teeth of these islanders are black (238); and finally, the island itself consists of black granite (232).

One incident which is particularly revealing about the Tsalalians' sense of self-sameness occurs aboard the Jane Guy upon the schooner's arrival at the island. Too-wit, the island chief, who decides to inspect the vessel (which he takes to be a living creature), happens upon his “reflected self” in the cabin mirrors and nearly expires from fright (191). Obviously the scene points to a society of people so removed from civilization as not to have experienced anything as unnatural as a mirror; but the scene carries, additionally, the implication that in this pure, self-contained society one does not locate one's identity in relation to his essential otherness, as in Lacanian psychoanalysis, but rather one is complete in himself, in other words, self-identical.¹⁰ The order of the other in the formation of one's identity is completely absent in this world which is outside the differential structure of language.

Of course the originary landscape into which Pym journeys is nothing less than a reflection of the hero's own psychic movement toward his true, natural self. As Davidson argues, the events of Pym's journey are “an external mirroring of his own mind” (173). But there is another way in which the text dramatizes Pym's gradual confrontation with himself; and that is through the sort of doubling of selves that is so familiar to Poe's fiction. For Pym's successive associations with his New England schoolmate, Augustus Barnard, and with Dirk Peters, the half-breed Indian whom he befriends while on board the Grampus, in a way define his romantic quest for origins.

The identification between Pym and Augustus is made early on in the narrative when they are shown to be inseparable companions—to the point of sometimes occupying the same bed at night (47). It may of course be possible to draw homoerotic implications from such an association, but the real emphasis of their relationship as psychological doubles—as opposed to sexual partners—becomes clearer in Pym's statement concerning the kind of influence that Augustus' sea stories have upon him: “Augustus thoroughly entered into my state of mind. It is probable, indeed, that our intimate communion had resulted in a partial interchange of character” (57, emphasis mine).¹¹ Augustus, whose name, as Daniel Hoffman points out, is associated “with both the Age of Reason and with C. Auguste Dupin,” apparently represents that side of Pym which is rationalistic; indeed we observe Augustus' calculating mind when he cleverly arranges Pym's escape to sea on board his father's whaling vessel, the Grampus (Hoffman 269). Pym's handsome, white, Anglo-Saxon counterpart, whose eloquent manner of speaking incites Pym's wanderlust, is in direct contrast to Pym's more ferocious-looking and enigmatic double, Dirk Peters. Peters, who comes to replace Augustus as Pym's most intimate companion—and does so completely when Augustus dies—appears more animal-like than human, with legs that “were bowed in the most singular manner, and appeared to possess no flexibility whatever” (84). With an immense bald head upon which he wears a bearskin wig, and with long, protruding teeth, Peters represents Pym's dark, savage self. Though it may be true, as Leslie Fiedler asserts, that Peters' grotesque appearance reflects upon Poe's own aristocratic, and finally racist, attitude toward Indians and blacks in America, it would seem more in keeping with Poe's emphasis (in this story) on metaphysical matters to see Peters primarily as an emblem of the deep, mysterious truth of Pym's being—that point of “nature,” let us say, that Pym must approach within himself in order finally to know who he is (Fiedler 397).

But as already suggested, Pym's movement toward an originary state—his true self—seems to imply a simultaneous death—as it does in the culmination of his journey from the conventional world of New England to the primitive setting of the South Seas. Here too, in his movement from his Augustus-self to his Peters-self, Pym experiences a similar coincidence between death and his confrontation with his origins, depicted most poignantly in the scene in which Pym and Peters attempt to escape from their desperate conditions upon the island of Tsalal. Climbing down a sheer cliff wall, Pym stares “far down into the abyss” and is suddenly overcome with “a longing to fall” (229). It is an episode in some ways reminiscent of the final scene, in which Pym seems to perish in the embraces of the cataract. Instead of the “perfect whiteness,” standing ready to receive Pym is the dark figure of Dirk Peters:

I let go at once my grasp upon the peg, and, turning half round from the precipice, remained tottering for an instant against its naked face. But now there came a spinning of the brain; a shrill-sounding and phantom voice screwed 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.

(229)

Peters becomes—like the cataract—a kind of womb into which Pym falls; thus his maternal embrace signals Pym's return to origins.¹² That Pym endures in this scene a death-into-life is confirmed further on when Pym reports that upon his being saved by Peters “animation returned” and that he felt himself “a new being” (229). To be sure, death is linked once again with Pym's movement toward an originary state—toward his becoming one with the true self, as represented by Peters.

Pym's journey, it should be remembered, could not possibly begin were it not for a forged note. While stowing away on the Grampus, Pym excuses his absence from home by having his father receive a note forged by Augustus, explaining that Pym is invited to spend a fortnight with the sons of a family friend, Mr. Ross. The entire scheme for Pym's escape belongs to Augustus, from the time he invents it to the time he charges himself with “the inditing of this note and getting it delivered”; and so once again it is Augustus' “story”—his fiction—which initiates Pym's adventures upon the high seas (59).

Insofar as the “self” which Pym represents has its origins in other fiction—is really a textual self—Pym's “journey toward origins” marks a desire to escape the confines of fictionality, to become one with himself, to become his own author. But can he be the author of his own text in the sense of standing outside it—in a position of mastery? As the Preface raises the possibility of a confusion of identities between Pym and Mr. Poe, one is never quite certain who is being written by whom, who is the writing self and who is the written self. In a sense the rest of the narrative—Pym's journey—plays out this sort of struggle for mastery between the writer and the written, the interpreter and the interpreted, with various surrogate authors (or authority figures) whom Pym must “overthrow” in order to fulfill his ultimate desire. In this respect we can view the entire journey as an interpretive one, analogous to the very representation of that journey in writing. Pym's need to master his physical destiny upon the high seas parallels exactly, indeed becomes no different than, his desire to win control over the text by becoming that text's author, its origin.

Throughout the narrative Pym must contend with a number of father figures—the first ones being his own father, a sea store trader from Nantucket, and his grandfather, Peterson, a wealthy Edgarton attorney. The latter example is revealing in that Pym, though he is shown to be able to elude the control of his “father,” cannot finally come to a position of mastery with himself. In the last instant before he is about to board the ship, Pym escapes his grandfather's notice by disguising himself as a sailor—wearing “a seaman's cloak” and feigning a seaman's gruff manner of speech (59, 60). In other words, in order to free himself of his “father,” and thus become his own origin (his true self), he must paradoxically become someone other than himself—he must dissimulate. Later on, in an effort to get control of the ship, Pym alarms the superstitious mutineers by disguising himself as the dead crewman, Rogers, representing himself as the “revivification of his disgusting corpse, or at least its spiritual image” (116). Again, Pym must resort to absenting himself—losing himself in an image or representation—in order to overthrow a certain authority figure. In the process of attaining mastery Pym loses it.

But Pym need not lose himself in disguise in order to make ironic whatever control he has over his journey; for with each overthrow of an authority figure there is another authority figure to take his place. Such figures aboard ship include Captain Barnard, the mutineers, Captain Guy, Augustus, and Peters (the name of the last recalling Pym's grandfather, Peterson). All of these “heads” Pym in some way tries to supersede, as if to become the head person himself—the author—of his interpretive journey. It is not surprising, therefore, that much of the struggle for mastery that goes on throughout the narrative is depicted in images of beheadings (or simply injuries to the head). We see, for instance, Captain Barnard fall victim to the villainous mutineers, sustaining “a deep wound in the forehead, from which blood was flowing in a continued stream” (82). Parker, one of the mutineers who comes in possession of the ship, in turn receives from Pym “a blow on the head” with a pump handle that Pym uses to arm himself (117). And if Pym delivers blows to the head, so too does he receive them, and with greater frequency. Often Pym's injuries to the head involve a mental disability—loss of memory or feelings of delirium due to hunger; but there are as well specific references made to physical assaults upon the head: for example, when Pym finds himself perilously affixed to the bottom of the Penguin, where “The head of the bolt had made its way through the green baize jacket I had on, and through the back part of my neck …” (53); and when Pym's dog, Tiger, having apparently gone mad, attacks him in his ironbound box, the dog's “sharp teeth pressing vigorously upon the woolen which enveloped [Pym's] neck” (78).

Though the general movement of Pym's journey is toward an originary (or natural) state—where Pym can finally locate the truth of himself—such a movement is suddenly undermined by the fact that Pym finds himself caught in a completely textual environment. From the Preface we understand that Pym may well be a product of Mr. Poe's imagination, as Mr. Poe is said to have co-authored the narrative (though just how much of it remains uncertain). This idea is further suggested when we discover, early on in the narrative, that Pym's origins—the starting point of his journey/narrative—is a place called Edgarton: as if to imply that Mr. [Edgar] Poe is Pym's true beginning, his origin, his author. (Though it is true that Edgarton is an actual town in New England, it is reasonable to assume that it becomes here a sly allusion to “Mr. Poe” of the Preface, who stands as Pym's double.) Indeed, we can see that Pym's authorship is from the start problematic—that aside from posing as a writing self he also finds himself in the position of a written self.¹³ Are we to assume, since the real Poe subverts his own authorship by portraying himself as a fictional character (in the Preface), that even Pym's “origin” is subject to a certain textual displacement—that it is a fiction?

There are several indications that Pym's whole sea adventure—or let us say his adventurer-self—has its “origin” in storytelling of one form or another. It is Augustus' “stories of the natives of the Island of Tinian, and other places he had visited in his travels” that first whet Pym's appetite for adventure, and that eventually result in his going out in his sailboat, the Ariel, upon “some of the maddest freaks in the world” (47). Other stories which Pym's boyhood companion relates—half of which Pym suspects are “sheer fabrications”—presage many of Pym's harrowing adventures on board the Grampus and the Jane Guy. Indeed, Augustus' tales of romance inspire precisely the sort of visions Pym reports later as having experienced: “visions … of shipwreck and famine; of death and captivity among barbarian hoardes” (57). In a sense Pym lives out the very stories upon which his imagination has been nourished. In his hiding place in the bottom of the Grampus, Pym also encounters stories which anticipate his adventures. Here, in his “ironbound box,” Pym finds among the books left to him one which narrates the “expedition of Lewis and Clark to the mouth of the Columbia” (63). Such a narrative has particular relevance to Pym's own journey insofar as Pym is likewise about to explore hitherto unknown waters—as Lewis and Clark did—and attempt to arrive at a place which designates undiscovered origins (as does the mouth of the Columbia).¹⁴ Pym ends up in his journey repeating what is already inscribed in a previous text, thus making his “journey toward origins” not in the least original.

Pym's loss of mastery is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that some of the authority figures—who also act as guides along his journey—do not by any means lead Pym in a direction of truth, but instead call attention to the falsity of interpretation, and the absence (or death) that interpretation brings to the interpreter.¹⁵ This is seen most clearly in connection with Pym's closest associates, Augustus and Dirk Peters, both of whom “manage” Pym's journey at the same time as they undermine it. Of course Pym's associates could not do otherwise, given that Pym's journey consists of his attempt to become himself the manager/author of his own journey; but the text dramatizes Pym's inability to attain the status of manager/author more explicitly, by suggesting that Pym's guides lead him to as much darkness as light—to as much a sense of death as one of life. Augustus is shown to take control of Pym's life at sea when Pym “knew little about the management of a boat” (49); and when Pym pursues his scheme of deception—in order to join the crew of the Grampus—he is “obliged to leave much to the management of Augustus …” (58). But despite his sense of management, Augustus puts his friend's life in jeopardy by going out in a stormy sea while in a “highly concentrated state of intoxication,” and thus wrecking Pym's sailboat (50). Arranging his escape on board the Grampus, Augustus installs Pym in a coffin-like box, where the latter eventually experiences “the most gloomy imaginings, in which the dreadful deaths of thirst, famine, suffocation, and premature interment, crowded upon me as the prominent disasters to be encountered” (70). Indeed, with Augustus as his guide, Pym enters into a realm of darkness, of death.

The hybrid “line manager,” Dirk Peters, takes up where Augustus leaves off in managing Pym's affairs, serving at once as the image of security as well as—because of his physical appearance and his name—the image of threatening danger (84).¹⁶ Though he does save Pym from falling off the cliff, we must remember that he is still described, even in that scene, as a “dusky, fiendish, and filmy figure,” in other words, as a figure not altogether friendly. As Fiedler points out, “Peters is not made an angelic representative of instinct and nature even at this critical instant; he remains still a fiend, even in the act of becoming a savior” (396). As already mentioned, implied in Pym's plunge into Peters' embrace is a kind of death—a loss of Pym's self the moment he ostensibly finds it. This “death,” together with the deathly connotation of Peters' first name (dirk = dagger), serves to indicate exactly what kind of consequences interpretation has for Pym.¹⁷

It should not go unnoticed that Dirk Peters, while he is a kind of interpreter for Pym, is also directly related to writing/interpretation through his name: in the sense that a dirk (dagger)—like a writing instrument—cuts, indents, inscribes. Style, it may be remembered, does not only mean a “mode of expressing thought in language” (Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary), but also may refer to a stylus, an instrument used to make imprints or incisions, in an early usage, “a weapon of offense, for stabbing” (Oxford English Dictionary). In this sense we can read Peters as Pym's writing instrument, a vehicle for Pym to reach a certain truth about himself. But of course such a penetration (cut, incision, inscription) into the mysteries of Pym's self is fraught with ambiguity from the start, as the writing instrument itself—Dirk Peters—is unfathomable, a blending of whiteness and darkness, of protective friend and ferocious demon. Pym's interpreter (his stylus, as it were) only serves to make more obscure what “truth” is “penetrated”; indeed it is in the very act of penetrating, of desiring such a truth that the truth is made impenetrable and unattainable.

A more obvious reference to Pym's attempt to penetrate the mysteries of his “journey toward origins” through writing comes with Pym's penknife. Jean Ricardou, who has already analyzed some of the metaliterary qualities of Pym, claims that when Pym passes his knife blade into the peculiar veined water on the island of Tsalal, he is penetrating something closely resembling a text. Drawing the parallels between a text and the “singular character of the water,” Ricardou argues (193): “If an imaginary perpendicular line is made to sever a given line of writing, the two severed fragments remain united in idea by an intense syntactic cohesion. If, on the other hand, a horizontal separation is made between two lines, the broken link, essentially spatial in nature, provides a very inferior sort of adhesion. This double complicity of the liquid with written language—by contiguity and similitude—encourages us to believe that what we are faced with is a text.”¹⁸ If this water is indeed a text, it is surely one whose readability is put in question, as we learn that this liquid which flows throughout the island is not at all clear. Says Pym: “Although it flowed with rapidity in all declivities where common water would do so, yet never, except when falling in a cascade, had it the customary appearance of limpidity.” Though the very next sentence in the narrative affirms just the opposite, that the water is “nevertheless, in point of fact, as perfectly limpid as any limestone water in existence, the difference only being in appearance” (194), we might do well to heed John Irwin's insight that limpidity or transparency is nothing but an appearance, and that such a statement must finally be considered ironic or, at the very least, contradictory (Irwin 155). It is as if to suggest that any sort of writing, any penetration of the blank page (as with a penknife) must render as much obscurity as it does clarity. Inscription here is the very defacement of truth, light, transparency.

In an earlier passage, one which in a certain way parallels the latter experience on the island, Pym attempts to penetrate the darkness of his “entombment” in the bottom of the Grampus. Having awakened from a state of unconsciousness, Pym searches for a way out—toward lightness, clarity:

I arose, and felt with my fingers for the seams or cracks of the aperture. Having found them, I examined them closely to ascertain if they emitted any light from the stateroom; but none was visible. I then forced the pen blade of my knife through them, until I met with some hard obstacle. Scraping against it, I discovered it to be a solid mass of iron which, from its peculiar wavy feel as I passed the blade along it, I concluded to be a chain cable.

(70)

In a way, the “wavy” chain cable repeats itself in the segmented, cable-like stream that Pym encounters on the island of Tsalal; and in this instance similar implications for writing hold forth. When Pym finally penetrates the dark labyrinthine tunnels of the Grampus, he does so to no avail; for his penetration—his “inscription”—does not result in his discovering any light—only another obstacle, and more darkness. We may say, then, that interpreting does not get Pym closer to establishing a truth, but rather drives him further away, the whole enterprise taking on the aspect of one labyrinth leading into another, with no end in sight. To be sure, the stateroom into which Pym tries to enter, and from which he hopes to gain some light (truth), is nothing less than a labyrinth: as its most prominent feature is “a set of hanging shelves full of books, chiefly of books of voyages and travels,” we may see the room as a kind of library, in other words, the site of more references, interpretations, signs (161).¹⁹ Escape from a textual world is all but impossible; that such is the case is further confirmed by Pym's journey into what seems to be the world of nature, of purity, of self-sameness—the island of Tsalal.

Contrary to all appearances, Pym's arrival at the island does not signal his confrontation with an originary state, with truth, for as we discover, what seems to be a completely natural environment turns out to be no less a “world of lies,” of artifice, than Edgarton. As already noted, the water that flows through the island may be said to possess the qualities of a text (according to Ricardou's metaliterary reading), but a perhaps more conclusive indication that writing inhabits this seemingly pure, asymbolic world—a world outside the difference upon which writing is based—comes in the peculiar designs of the chasms into which Pym and Dirk Peters venture. Though Pym is never actually convinced there is anything artificial about the chasms, the unnamed author of the final Note points out that the chasms, which Pym has sketched in a notepad, are shaped like alphabetical letters: when conjoined with one another they “constitute an Ethiopian verbal root—the root … ‘To be shady,’—whence all the inflections of shadow or darkness” (241).²⁰ The Note also affirms that the “singular-looking indentures” in the surface of the marl are (despite Pym's conviction to the contrary) the work of art—the hieroglyphical appearance is a representation of a human form (225); the rest of the indentures are “the Arabic verbal root … “‘To be white’” and “the full Egyptian word … ‘The region of the south’” (241). One might say that Pym, while attempting to penetrate into the heart of darkness—into a realm that would represent truth, presence, origins—comes upon a world literally made of writing, where nature is writing. But could it be otherwise, since Pym's writing/representation of the journey is impossible to distinguish from the journey itself?²¹

Of course we need not wholly depend on the text's final voice of authority (in the Note) to realize that a difficulty exists in distinguishing nature from artifice—indeed that the one might be included in the other; for even Pym (who attempts to prove scientifically that the indentures can only be the “work of nature”) alerts us to the possibility of a confusion between the representation of nature and nature itself. At the site of the first chasm he encounters, for instance, Pym asserts that it is “one of the most singular looking places imaginable, and we could scarcely bring ourselves to believe it altogether the work of nature” (222); and finding himself near the ruins of a disruptured cliff, he comments that “the surface of the ground in every other direction was strewn with huge tumuli, apparently the wreck of some gigantic structures of art; although, in detail, no semblance of art could be detected” (230). Pym's observation of the landslide that buries thirty-two crew members also invokes the idea that “art” can easily take on the appearance of nature, and that one is not always distinguishable from the other. The soapstone hills of Tsalal, he suggests, are stratified in such a way that “every natural convulsion would be sure to split the soil into perpendicular layers or ridges running parallel with one another; and a very moderate exertion of art would be sufficient for effecting the same purpose” (211, emphasis mine).

That nature and artifice cannot be easily separated out, that each indeed may be said to be incorporated in the other, immediately puts in question any conception of the island as a place which is self-identical—pure. Even the island's most definitive quality, its all-black appearance, turns out to be simply that, an appearance, for we discover that positioned at the very core of this blackness—within the black chasms—are nothing less than “white arrowhead flints” (224, emphasis mine). Moreover, inscribed on the chasm wall, as the Note indicates, is the Arabic verbal root meaning “to be white,” further suggesting that defilement (or difference) is something completely “natural” to the island. And it should be noted that if the pure black identity of Tsalal is a fiction, we discover also that the pure white identity of that region directly to the south—Tekeli-li—is likewise a fiction. For in the world of “brilliancy and whiteness” (241) there comes precisely the sort of “inflections of shadow or darkness’ we find on Tsalal (241); indeed, as Pym and Dirk Peters approach the end of their voyage and sail into the “perfect whiteness” of the sea, we are informed that “The darkness had materially increased” (238), and what stands before them is a collection of images associated with obscurity—curtains, veils, shrouds (all relating to the cataract that engulfs Pym).²²

To be sure, Pym's journey succeeds in encountering not a world of self-sameness, but one of self-difference; and insofar as these geographical realms are external manifestations of Pym's psychic journey toward himself, we can now say that the culmination of his journey does not signify Pym's return to himself, to a sense of wholeness and unity, but instead points to Pym's “identity” as one which can only be understood in terms of its essential otherness—its difference. The “shrouded human figure” that looms before Pym in the final scene is nothing less than a shadowy projection of Pym's own self—his mirror image cast up, and elongated, in the engulfing cataract.²³ His death (and his life), in other words, become precisely his own inscription in “nature.”

Though we witness the author's death at the end of the narrative, there comes in the form of a final Note—a post-script—an attempt to “save” the text, to establish a sense of authority. Here, an unnamed narrator tries to tie up the story's loose ends by suggesting that Pym had escaped death at sea, only to have perished later on in an accident of some kind—an accident in which the remaining chapters of the narrative had become “irrecoverably lost” (240). He further tells us that Dirk Peters is still alive, and could provide an accurate conclusion to Pym's story if he can ever be found. Clearly, the question of authoring the ending of Pym, bringing the text to a successful closure, is what most interests this unnamed narrator; it is precisely his invocation of the problem of the text's open-endedness—and his explanation for the open-endedness—which becomes his way of trying to establish closure. His is a desire to have the final word, to become the text's final authority, and he attempts to satisfy this desire by filling in one of the text's deepest holes—the mystery of the chasm designs.

But in investigating the strange configurations of the chasms, all the author has done is lead us back into the text, or rather into a world made of words: an abyss whose depth turns out to be more language (the writing/indentures inside the chasm). As Irwin points out, “Thus the note returns the reader to the chasm episode, presumably to retrace the narrative line to the final break in the text, and then on to the note which sends him back to the chasm episode, and so on” (196). But then we realize that the author of the Note even suspects that his “ending” is no ending at all, when he remarks, “Conclusions such as these open a wide field for speculation and exciting conjecture. They should be regarded, perhaps, in connection with some of the most faintly detailed incidents of the narrative; although in no visible manner is this chain of connection complete” (242). His reading of Pym becomes no more conclusive than Pym's interpretation of his own adventure, and thus it seems that any sort of authority must remain questionable.

The final irony of the Note comes in the text's last line, a quotation: “I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock” (242). It is obvious that this sentence, Biblical-sounding (though not taken from the Bible), does not belong to the same discourse, the same mode of signification, as the words above it in the Note; and yet it does set off a similar problem as the rest of the Note, insofar as the words attempt to rise to a position of authority—with their godlike intonation. If Irwin is correct in saying that the author of these words is “Not the Creator of the physical universe, but the creator of the written world of Pym,” we should not be surprised to find “within the hills” some clue to the creator's identity (Irwin 227). Again, we are directed back into the body of the narrative, and forced to reread the chasms that had just been apparently deciphered. Like other critics, we might see in the strange designs of the chasms (in addition to the verbal roots of ancient languages) the creator's initials, “e a p” … or in the designs of the indentures, the author's last name spelled out in reverse, “E O P” … ²⁴ Here, the whole notion of authorship/authority is suddenly made ironic, as the real Poe becomes inscribed in his own narrative—the author graven and in his grave.

Notes

1. Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (New York: Penguin Books, 1980) 239. All future references to Pym pertain to this edition.

2. The open-endedness of the text refers to the way in which the narrative abruptly breaks off without our knowing what happens to Pym. The unnamed author of the Note informs us of the loss of two or three final chapters of the text.

3. Edward H. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966) 177.

4. Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe, trans. John Rodker (London: Hogarth Press, 1949) 351.

5. For discussions of hoaxing in Poe, see G. R. Thompson, Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1973); and Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1972).

6. Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josue V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979) 142-43.

7. For a discussion of the doubling of Poe and Pym, see Harold Beaver, “Introduction,” Pym 9.

8. Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick, eds. Hayford and Parker (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1967) 542.

9. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966). See also Jonathan Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), who explains that “Meaning depends on difference of meaning; only through difference of meaning can one identify forms and their defining functional qualities. Forms are not something given; they must be established through analysis of a system of relations and differences” (72).

10. See Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror-phase as Formative of the Function of the I,” trans. Jean Roussel, New Left Review 51 (1968): 71-77.

11. For a discussion of the homoerotic implications in Pym, see Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Stein and Day, 1966) 391-400.

12. Fiedler's inclination to read the passage as a sexual fantasy leads him to say that “the studied ambiguity of the passage, in which the language of horror becomes that of eroticism, the dying plunge becomes a climactic embrace, makes it clear that the longing to fall and the desire for the dark spouse are one, a single perverseness” (396).

13. For an interesting discussion of the way in which the writing self becomes the written self, see John Irwin, American Hieroglyphics (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980) 114-29.

14. Irwin in American Hieroglyphics sees the image of the mouth of the Columbia as associated with “a nexus of traditional images of origin that was reworked during the Romantic period, under the pressure of recent historical events” (78). Included in this nexus are the source of the Nile, of the Mississippi, and the South Pole.

15. Simply, this means that the interpreter cannot stand in a privileged position in relation to what he is interpreting; for in the process of interpreting he cannot help but become the very object of interpretation, thus losing himself within the confines of textuality. The writer/interpreter subverts his self-presence in the act of interpreting. Says Eugenio Donato, “What begins by being the questioning of the subject inevitably turns out to be an indictment of him who questions in the first place” (“The Two Languages of Criticism,” The Structuralist Controversy, eds. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1972] 96).

16. Though we have already described Peters as a maternal figure, the ambiguity of his character also allows him the status of a father figure, perhaps inherited from one of Pym's previous “fathers,” Peterson.

17. Pym's dog, Tiger, may also be seen as a kind of interpreter-guide, as he delivers Pym a message from Augustus. But man's best friend is also seen as a potential enemy, when Tiger, driven mad by the insufferable conditions of the hold, attacks Pym (78).

18. Jean Ricardou, “The Singular Character of the Water,” trans. Frank Towne, Poe Studies 9.1 (June 1976): 4.

19. Perhaps the best illustration of the library as denoting an endless deferral of meaning is Borges' story, “The Library of Babel,” in Labyrinths, trans. J. E. I. (New York: New Directions, 1964) 51-58.

20. Pym's doubt that the chasm is “altogether a work of nature,” is more an expression of amazement at the chasm's features than of true skepticism (222).

21. It is as if Pym's very interpretation, or representation, of his “journey toward origins” precludes the possibility of his ever encountering those origins; or, as in the words of John Carlos Rowe, who prefers to see Pym's journey as a movement toward a metaphysical and geographical center, “in the very effort of writing such a story that center is displaced, disrupted, deferred” (“Writing and Truth in Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Glyph 2 [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978] 110).

22. Irwin points out in American Hieroglyphics: “And just as whiteness lies at the core of the dark realm of Tsalal, so darkness must be present in the white realm of Tekeli-li, otherwise there could be no color boundary, no figure/ground differentiation, no signification” (204).

23. One may easily relate this scene to the previous one in which Pym falls into the embrace of his shadow self, Dirk Peters. Both scenes point to the otherness that is necessary to define oneself.

24. For an interesting discussion of how the hills may be read, see Daniel Wells, “Engraved Within the Hills: Further Perspectives on the Ending of Pym,” Poe Studies 10.1 (June 1977): 13-15. Also Irwin discusses this problem in American Hieroglyphics 228.