According to David Ketterer, in his survey of Pym criticism from 1980-90,¹ recent approaches to the text have included psychoanalytical, mythic, psychological, existential, social, formal, hoax-based, satiric and ironic, deconstructive and visionary studies. As far as I am aware, drink is treated as a serious preoccupation in only a few of those readings. Given Poe's reputation, this is rather surprising. The singer Dean Martin once defined sobriety as the ability to lie on a floor without having to hold on, and somehow the image we have of Poe is of a man struggling to maintain his grip, not only on sobriety, but on sanity as well. Rufus Griswold's portrait of the artist as a drug addict and alcoholic, permanently in search of some gutter to stagger into, is, like all depictions of excess, excessive in itself. Poe was certainly never addicted to opium, however much he used it, and he was easily, rather than always, drunk: although the part played by alcohol in his early death cannot be underestimated, the truth is that for much of his life he drank scarcely, but could never hold it. As I hope to demonstrate in the course of this paper, his problems were at once more banal, and more deeply disturbing.

In Poetry and the Age Randall Jarrell wrote that, ‘after a few decades or centuries almost everybody will be able to see through [Emily] Dickinson to her poems’.² The same point might be made with equal justice about Poe, for, like Dickinson, his reputation can often get in the way of his writing. The drunken episode at the beginning of Pym is a case in point. Pym is fooled into believing his friend Augustus to be sober when he suggests that they go out sailing at night and in rough weather, only to discover after a while that Augustus, who is at the helm and is therefore supposed to be steering, is in fact ‘so drunk—beastly drunk—he could no longer either stand, speak, or see’.³ The temptation is to feel that the writer somehow approves of their actions: such a combination of Romantic recklessness and vision seems close to our own views on Poe himself. But the incident is significant for other reasons. It is the first example of deception in a book where deception inevitably leads to disaster or to destruction. Pym's trust in Augustus is, of course, totally misplaced, since what initially appears to be a ‘most delightful and most reasonable’ proposition (p. 48) turns out to be the very opposite of anything rational, a ‘mad idea’ (p. 48) brought on by intoxication. Augustus, in fact, never lives up to a name which is meant to suggest a degree of reason and intellectual control: he is able only to ‘imitate the outward demeanor of one in perfect possession of his senses’ (p. 50, my italics).

The issue of failing to control the senses is a significant and stimulating one, for there is a recurring failure to maintain order of one sort or another throughout the book. Images of inebriation, or delirium, are one way of recognizing this preoccupation, for drinking leads to a lack of control, a disorientation which has social as well as psychological consequences. Drinking overcomes reason in the same way that a largely drunken crew overcome the captain of the Grampus, and with exactly the same result—shipwreck, or the loss of the ability to navigate, and therefore to control. In fact, Augustus is not only the son of a ship's captain but, at the rudder of the Ariel, he is effectively a ship's captain himself, and is therefore the first of many who come out of the book rather badly. Despite occupying positions of command, Block, Barnard, and Guy all make crucial and often disastrous errors of judgment. All three are like Augustus in the sense that they are trusted, and fail to live up to that trust. But the three are also like Pym, in the sense that they are too trusting, and often confuse appearance with reality. Block, captain of the Penguin, trusts his instinct as a sailor and makes the near-fatal mistake of believing that no one could have survived the wreck of the Ariel. It is only the persistence of his crew which results in Augustus and Pym being saved from certain death by drowning. Barnard, captain of the Grampus, makes the mistake of entrusting his safety, and that of others, to a suspect crew and boat—described as ‘an old hulk, and scarcely seaworthy’ (p. 58) at one stage—and if he cannot be blamed directly for the mutiny, he can be blamed for not supervising the proper loading of the ship's cargo. Finally, Guy, captain of the Jane Guy, makes the mistake of trusting Too-Wit and his island savages. This is something that not even the chief himself does, for seeing his own reflection in a mirror on board the ship, he reacts with considerable fear and alarm: the reaction is so excessive, in fact, that Pym tells us that the ‘thought the savage would go mad’ (p. 191), a word which crucially links him with other deceivers in the book. The truth is that, for Poe especially, the Chief is mad; the mirror is a trick device to show us Too-wit as he really is, and not as he appears to be: confronted with himself, he reacts with a clearly appropriate terror. But all three captains are easily misled, in the sense that they are too credulous, too ready to believe what they think they see. And Poe appears at one stage to suggest that this is a failing shared by all humankind; it is said that in ‘no affairs of mere prejudice, pro or con, do we deduce inferences with entire certainty even from the most simple data’ (p. 53), and even though this is Pym speaking, it seems to reiterate the narrative preoccupation with the human inability to interpret facts properly.

Throughout the narrative, drink is associated not only with various forms of deception but with mania. According to Pym, the adventure with Augustus is ‘the result of a highly concentrated state of intoxication—a state which [is] like madness’ (p. 50). At a later stage, when they are left without provisions on what remains of the Grampus, Augustus, Peters and Parker all suffer from ‘a species of delirium’ (p. 136) induced by wine, and all three persuade Pym to explore the submerged cabin of the ship so that they can drink while he dives. Of course, this takes place not long after the crew have overthrown the captain and been overthrown in their turn, and indeed madness and mutiny, drink and deception are all closely related in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. It is interesting that Poe chooses to bring Pym, suffering from a combination of hunger, hangover and sensory deprivation in the hold of the Grampus, close to an insane despair at the same time as an intoxicated crew indulge in a desperately bloody, and barbaric, form of insanity on the upper decks. Pym, of course, has already indulged in a parallel rebellion against parental authority by stowing away on the ship in the first place, and it is especially significant that he only just manages to evade a representative of that authority, in the shape of his grandfather, Mr Peterson, by impersonating a drunken sailor. The rule of order is disrupted in all three cases, with nightmarish consequences.

It is particularly intriguing, then, that much of this revolt against authority is accompanied by references to letter-writing, story-telling and fictional masquerading of one sort or another, and connected to the theme of deception in the book. Pym admits to boarding the Grampus by using a ‘scheme of deception’ (p. 58), and again places his trust in Augustus, who conceals his disappearance by forging a letter from Mr Ross, a distant relative, to his family. But from the very beginning of the book, Augustus is associated with tall tales of one sort or another. Pym observes at the start of the first chapter that he ‘was always talking to me of his adventures in the South Pacific Ocean’ and ‘telling me stories’ (p. 47), then complains at the beginning of the second chapter that, at dinner especially, Augustus ‘had a manner of relating his stories of the ocean (more than half of which I now suspect to have been fabrications)’ (p. 57). But since he is so closely connected with Augustus, he suffers from a sort of guilt by association. Besides, Pym deceives his grandfather, and his minor role-playing leads him into a theatre of the absurd where roles are unrehearsed, the script is illegible, the director has been murdered and total breakdown ensues. Stuck in the hold, Pym is no longer able to comprehend, or to communicate with, the world outside him. The fact that he is unable to read the message sent to him by Augustus is crucial at this point, for it indicates not only that Pym is on the verge of collapse, but that there is a more widespread slide into anarchy taking place above deck. The ship is a universe without an authority figure, and because of that signs no longer make sense, and both the rules of language and the rule of law break down.

Poe seems to be pointing out that, in such a world, all human perception is suspect. The imagination in particular is potentially destructive: to overreach is to run the risk of toppling over into chaos. At a very basic level, there is an obvious critique of the more excessive claims for the imagination made by the Romantics—indeed, Pym's middle name, Gordon, is one that he shares with Lord Byron, and at times he seems to be acting out the part of a Byronic hero. In addition, Pym and Augustus have their first, and nearly their last, adventure at sea in the Ariel, which is, of course, the name of the boat Shelley drowned in. Still attracted by fictional visions of ‘shipwreck and famine: of death or captivity among barbarian hordes’ (p. 57), their next journey on the Grampus ends in a horrible death for one and a mysterious disappearance for the other. Nonetheless, Poe's criticism is not simply a literary one, but extends to the social, and even to the racial, sphere. It is therefore useful to note that the mutineers themselves finally fall foul of their own drunken imaginations. Soon after taking over the Grampus they are divided into opposing camps, the stronger side having come together less out of loyalty than out of a liking for the picture Dirk Peters paints, in words, of life in the South Pacific. We are told that Peters ‘dwelt on the world of novelty and amusement to be found among the innumerable islands of the Pacific’, until finally ‘the pictures of the hybrid line manager [took] strong hold upon the ardent imaginations of the seamen’ (p. 93). Faced with a choice between competing narratives, the seamen vote for the one which is most skilfully presented. In the process they subtly change from being a group of actors, in control of their own destinies, to a passive audience in a drama not of their own making. In the end, this is their undoing. Their ability to reason considerably weakened by alcohol, again, and the combination of superstition and more stories from Dirk Peters, the mutineers are momentarily deceived by the appearance of Pym, disguised as Rogers' ghost. All of them are either killed right away, or die later, and the fact that their deaths seem implausible suggests, I think, that Poe's political will took precedence over his creative imagination in the writing of these scenes: the justice is not poetic, but socially conservative and reactionary. Pym plays dead because he represents the angel of death, messenger from a dark and vengeful deity.

If the living can impersonate the dead, the dead prove just as capable of impersonating the living. One of the most grotesque contributions to the preoccupation with deception in the book is the appearance of the Dutch trading ship, which seems to represent salvation for the shipwrecked survivors of the Grampus, but is eventually shown to be peopled only by a crew and passengers who are dead. This is a confidence trick, again, though one with several implications for the narrative as a whole. At one level, the ship is a parody of different kinds of hope. The survivors ask for ‘deliverance’—an important word in the text, with obvious religious connotations—and are sent a different kind of message. The vessel does not ferry passengers from one location to another, and nor will it carry Pym and his comrades from the world of death and disorder to the land of the living and of the known, the familiar. In that sense, it seems to defeat the desire for solid ground, for certainty, while also deflating the traditional images of death as a journey from this life to the next. Ultimately, therefore, the boat is an image not of Christian promise and reward but of a more Calvinistic system of punishment and retribution. In particular, the image of ‘a huge seagull, busily gorging itself with the horrible flesh’ from one corpse is meant to remind us of the Promethean myth: Pym records with horror the ‘portion of clotted and liverlike substance in its beak’ (p. 133). It is worth pointing out that, as Harold Beaver has argued, ‘this myth of rebellion against fathers’⁴ has obvious implications for both Augustus and Pym, and puts their punishment into a new and interesting context. The book does not simply concern itself with filial disobedience, but with the consequences of Adam's disobedience, and the subsequent expulsion from Eden. The father is first rejected, then sought after and returned to, and the book charts that movement. But the suggestion that the Deity can at times be a terrible, vengeful figure not only echoes the views of Puritan preachers like Jonathan Edwards but goes some way to explaining the preponderance of suspect signs, hoaxes and deception in the book. For this is a fallen universe, and it is to that fact that Poe draws our attention, by using fiction to point out that all facts are appearances only.

In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, things are never quite what they seem. The book itself is an adventure story which pretends to be a factual account of a journey so incredible that it must masquerade as a fiction if it is to be given any credence at all. This is only ‘pretended fiction’, Pym informs us in the preface; it is ‘a narrative,’ he goes on to claim, ‘publish(ed) … under the garb of fiction’ (p. 44). The immediate, and intriguing, effect of this authorial decoy is, of course, to make the relationship between reader and writer much more ambiguous and problematic. The suspicion that the entire book may be a gigantic hoax, an absurd joke at the reader's expense, is hardly a way to inspire confidence in the facts of the narration. On several occasions in what is a highly self-conscious text we are told that particular events are nearly too fantastic to be believed. Pym himself admits that the ‘incidents to be narrated’ could only seem like ‘an impudent and ingenious fiction’ (p. 43). He and Augustus are saved from the remnants of the wrecked Ariel because of ‘almost inconceivable pieces of good fortune’ (p. 53). And Pym puts his own extended survival down to a ‘vast chain of apparent miracles’ (p. 194). Lines such as these are playful but unsettling: it is as if one can hear behind them a ghostly laugh emanating from Poe, the would-be ghost-writer.

Part of the unspoken narrative contract of any book is that, as readers, we choose to believe what we are being told, but of course this can only happen if the person who is doing the narrating, and the narrative itself, is credible. But from an early stage Augustus in particular is identified as being unreliable. ‘Schoolboys,’ it is pointed out towards the end of the opening chapter, ‘can accomplish wonders in the way of deception’ (p. 56). The point being made here is not so much that Pym and Augustus are dishonest, but that it is extremely difficult to maintain trust in characters whose reading of events and other people is so consistently open to question. In fact, Poe takes every opportunity to remind us that the vessel of narration is just as suspect as the vessels of navigation it purports to describe. The Grampus is packed ‘full of books, chiefly books of voyages and tales’ (p. 61). Pym sets off on his adventure in the hold of the ship by selecting an account of ‘the expedition of Lewis and Clark to the mouth of the Columbia’ (p. 63). The narrative itself ends by literally dissolving in front of us, as Poe removes the curtain of writing to reveal the white page underneath. As readers, our confidence in the facts of the narration is constantly undermined, and it is as if Poe is deliberately trying to encode a kind of permanent sense of unease and wariness within his text. We are told in the Preface, for instance, that Pym ‘kept no journal during a greater portion of the time in which [he] was absent’ (p. 43), but a journal form is adopted at several stages in the narrative. Pym even goes so far as to produce ‘a pocketbook and pencil’ (p. 223) from nowhere in order to record the mysterious hieroglyphics on Too-Wit's island. Poe borrows extensively from other narratives and inserts them into his own. Clearly then, this undermining of our trust as readers is as systematic as it is deliberate. The writer is not only drawing attention to the suspect status of his text, but to the fallibility of his audience. We ourselves are constantly capable of being deceived, and part of the logic of Poe's method is to remind us of this at every opportunity. We are as implicated in the facts of the Fall as the protaganists of his book.

If the mind is fallen, it is because the world itself is fallen also. Evidence of this is partly argued by the appearance of Nature in the text, for even it is capable of deceit. Desolation Island, for instance, appears lush with vegetation, but is in fact covered in saxifrage. Yet another island turns out to be ‘a low rocky islet’ containing nothing more than a species of prickly pear, a desert in all but name (p. 185). The Auroras, a group of islands discovered by the Spanish in 1762, and seen again in 1790, are in fact non-existent, and therefore revealed as a hoax. Observing a breed of penguins, Pym remarks that ‘the resemblance to a human figure is very striking, and would be apt to deceive the spectator at a casual glance or in the gloom of the evening’ (p. 166). But Nature's crudest deception is the co-habitation on Kerguelen Island of the white albatross, king of the sea-birds, with the black penguins who pretend to be human. These two species seem to live together in great friendship and apparent harmony, and we are told that ‘nothing can be more astonishing than the spirit of reflection evinced by these feathered beings, and nothing surely can be better calculated to elicit reflection in every well-regulated human intellect’ (p. 169). In fact this invitation to consider the possible human significance of two breeds sharing the one living space is a trap, and one which prefigures the brief co-habitation of white sailors and black islanders on Tsalal. Speaking just before the ambush which ends this idyll, Pym claims that during ‘the whole of this adventure we saw nothing in the demeanor of the natives calculated to create suspicion, with the single exception of the systematic manner in which their party was strengthened during our route from the schooner to the village’ (p. 200). This of course is the most spectacular deception in the book, and one which results in the deaths of most of the crew of the Jane Guy and the horrific destruction of nearly a thousand natives when the boat is eventually blown up.

In fact this breach of trust on the part of the natives is at once the most bloody and the most significant one in the narrative, and it is possible to argue that the device of alerting the reader to one deception after another indicates a conscious and cumulative agenda at work in the book. Poe is warning his gullible public not about the dangers of fiction but about the perceived threat posed by the slave community in antebellum America. As the ship is navigated southwards to the whiteness and purity of Antarctica the narrative becomes increasingly concerned with historical Southern fears of black insurrection and massacre. The signposts are obvious. Towards the close of the novel, Pym is able to see from the Jane Guy ‘a singular ledge of rock … projecting into the sea, and bearing a strange resemblance to corded bales of cotton’ (p. 185). And the inhabitants of Tsalal are clearly projections, caricatures rather than characters. The males are associated with the biche-de-mer, the sea cucumber, and therefore with white prejudices about black sexual prowess. Speaking of the native women, Pym remarks on their nakedness but goes on to note that ‘their lips, however, like those of the men, were thick and clumsy, so that even when laughing, the teeth were never disclosed’. In reality, of course, the teeth are not disclosed because Poe cannot bring himself to admit a possible connection, however small, between the natives and the whites.

The book ends as a kind of racist allegory, a sort of Pogrom's Progress. And its message is sanctioned by Scripture. Entering the native village for the first time, Pym refers to ‘as many as forty (of them) sitting on their hams’ (p. 198), and Harold Beaver has again demonstrated how Poe himself believed that the practice of slavery was literally justified by the Bible, since it was a direct result of the curse of Ham, whose dark sons were ‘fated to occupy the southernmost zones of the earth’.⁵ Shortly after this, when he comes across the hieroglyphics, Pym believes that he is being deceived, but these figures turn out to be partly in Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament. The final lines of the book, ‘I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock’, are taken from the book of Job, and again demonstrate a continuing belief on Poe's part in the reality of the biblical curse, which has yet to be satisfactorily completed in his eyes. The point seems to be that only the signs of the Bible endure and are real, and only they can be relied upon. As I have argued, Poe develops the idea of men falling about drunk to argue that all humanity is in fact fallen. From this proceeds not a literary classic but a relentlessly literal reading of Scripture as it applies to the world of pre-Civil War America. Poe's delusions were not fostered by any alcoholic addiction, but by the Southern dream of white supremacy and the nightmare of racial hatred.

Notes

1. D. Ketterer, ‘Tracing Shadows: Pym Criticism, 1980-90’, in R. Kopley (ed.), Poe's Pym: Critical Explorations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), pp. 233-74.

2. R. Jarrell, Poetry and the Age (London: Faber & Faber, 1973), p. 106.

3. E. A. Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (ed. H. Beaver; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 50. All subsequent references in my text to the book are by page number to this edition.

4. Beaver, Commentary, p. 257.

5. Beaver, Introduction, p. 24.